Emma
Evil Liberal Leftist
Both President Obamas health care plan and his presidency are going down the toilet.
This is well, and right, and just as it should be.
Obama is turning out to be a disastrous president, wholly unsuited for the times and our national and global challenges, and his job approval ratings reflect this.
In Obama, we get all the corporate toadying of the last Democratic president, along with an even greater unwillingness than Clinton and who wouldve thought that was possible to name names, call out enemies, and throw a freakin punch every other year or so. (Were also getting a continuation of the civil rights and civil liberties policies of Dick Cheney, as an extra added bonus, but thats another story.) What makes it even more astonishing this time around, however, is that weve seen this movie before, and we know how it ends. There is apparently absolutely no bottom as the events of recent weeks have reconfirmed to the pit of vicious lies, brutal tactics, and democracy-demolishing antics of which regressives will avail themselves in their practice of contemporary American politics. In addition to not being prepared for that, Barack Obama is still seemingly unable to raise his voice a decibel or two against the very people who are helping him to destroy his own presidency. Indeed, he is negotiating bipartisan (read: total capitulation) deals with them, even as they relentlessly trash him before a national audience.
Is this president so deluded that he believes there are limitations on what the right will do not only to the republic, for which Obama seems to have only passing regard, but also to his presidency, for which we might imagine he would have at least some concern? Does the Kumbaya Kid think that regressives wont seek to annihilate him every bit as much as they did Bill Clinton, even as they are obsessing at this very moment over harebrained conspiracy stories challenging his very legal right to be president, his very citizenship? Does this guy who seems to want, more than anything, for everyone just to be happy and sing along in the same key, still really believe in bipartisanship, at the very moment when the very people with whom he is negotiating are reinforcing the most absurd and inflammatory lies asserting the elder-cide intentions of his health-care bill?...
...One might be excused for beginning to get the feeling that what Obama really wants from healthcare reform is simply to be able to say that he did it. No matter that there is almost no reform in his healthcare reform legislation. No matter that he doesnt even have his own proposal, but is deferring to the worst elements of a legislative body that is a wholly owned subsidiary of American corporate interests. No matter that whatever little effect the legislation will have wont even begin to be seen for another four years, and then will be phased in after that, over yet another period of several years. And no matter that, even after the law goes into effect, this country will continue to suffer from all the major maladies of a system designed principally to provide profits for a few, rather than healthcare for all.
What continues to astonish me, however, is what passes for political calculus in the White House these days. I never assumed that Obama would necessarily be any different from Bill Clinton, in the sense that he might actually have a set of good progressive politics or that he might actually give a damn about the American public. No disappointment there (although did he have to be even worse than that, more like Bush than Clinton?). However, I always assume that almost all politicians are completely consumed by the one thing that Clinton was ever truly passionate about: self-interest.
But, even purely from that narrowest of perspectives, does the Obama team actually believe that their strategy is helping their guy politically? Do they really like the way that their failure to articulate a plan, or even a set of fundamental principles, has worked out in terms of shaping the debate over healthcare? Is it really their belief that they can go to the voters in 2012 and win their hearts with a nothingburger healthcare plan, passed three years prior, and due to fully kick in three years hence? I hate more than a root canal sans novocaine to sound like one of the regressives whom I so very much loathe, but if this is the level of political sophistication to be found in the Obama White House, then, no, as a matter of fact, I really dont want this clown negotiating with Vladimir Putin.
Barack Obama has given us the worst of all worlds. Passage of a healthcare reform bill even something barely remotely worthy of the name now seems like a dubious proposition. If it does pass, it wont be worth squat. Meanwhile, all the ugliest and most deceitful tactics of regressive politics have floated to the surface in the cesspool of American political discourse, weakly countered at best by a White House that could make SpongeBob SquarePants look like the love child of Genghis Khan and Joseph Stalin by comparison, and is so lame that it couldnt anticipate and inoculate against these assaults that any fool who wasnt entirely comatose over the last three decades could plainly see were coming. Worst of all, when the smoke finally clears, this debacle will entail a massive discrediting of so-called liberalism, and a severe imperiling of the Democratic Party (not that it much matters) in the next two election cycles. Think about that for a second. How absolutely, utterly, magnificently inept does one have to be to have revived the hopes of the GOP, a mere 200 days after George W. Bush and Dick Cheney left office? Not just any idiot could pull off a stunt that big, I tell ya. A job like that requires a world-class moron.
What Obama should have done is simple, and therefore all the more astonishing that they missed it. First off, he should have formulated a serious plan (perhaps in faux negotiations with certain key congressional leaders, to make them feel powerful and included, perhaps not), and stuck with it. At the very least, he should have articulated three or four non-negotiable key principles that he demanded from any healthcare legislation. These should have revolved around ideas that are simple to grasp and clearly beneficial to non-elite Americans. He should have sold that plan at big staged events, such as televised addresses to both houses of Congress rather than these pathetic press conferences he keeps giving, where the press can ask any question they want, and where an unscripted Professor Wonk rambles out ten minute answers, chock full of pauses and clauses, guaranteed to anesthetize his audience or divert their attention entirely, to another subject altogether (can you say Henry Lewis Gates?).
He should have named enemies, right from the beginning. He should have warned Americans about what these people would do in the ensuing weeks and months. And he should have called them out on it, angrily and by name, when they in fact did it. When they started lying and frightening senior citizens in order to protect their legalized scams from reform, he should have slugged them so hard they were knocked on their fat corporate asses, never to rise again. He shouldve called them greedy, selfish, treasonous traitors who are willing to lie and steal to further enrich their bloated selves, while tens of thousands of Americans die every year from lack of medical care.
Above all, what Obama should have done was shown some passion. The unflappable conciliatory professor act has got to go. Heres a newsflash (evidently) for the Obama White House: If the president has any desire to sell his policies, hes got to sell his policies. If he wants to lead, he has to lead. And if he wants our support, hes got to tell us why this is important. With juice. Mr. Folksy isnt getting it not by a long shot.
Finally, Obama shouldve jammed his plan down the throats of Congress, where though youd never know it his party commands massive and filibuster-proof majorities. I dont know about anyone else, but I dont think the nineteenth century model of the presidency is particularly appropriate here in the twenty-first. We got Social Security and the rest of the New Deal programs because Franklin Roosevelt twisted arms on Capitol Hill. We got Medicare and Medicaid and civil rights because Lyndon Johnson nearly pulled those arms out of their sockets, jamming his bills through a reluctant Congress by means of big carrots, bigger sticks, and razor-sharp strategy.
What did Millard Fillmore get? James Buchanan? If you cant remember, dont worry it doesnt mean that youre deficient as a student of American history. It just means that they didnt get anything worth remembering. Why is it that, in our time, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush get everything they want from Congress, while Bill Clinton and Barack Obama even after theyve completely sold out to Wall Street, and even when they have massive majorities in Congress wind up as if theyre the main source of entertainment for the fellas on Cell Block D? Neither FDR nor Harry Truman nor Lyndon Johnson would recognize the Democratic Party anymore. Unless they inadvertently mistook it for a squashed bug in the foyer of the GOPs headquarters.
Having lived through the incredibly dismal Clinton era, Im not exactly surprised to have another Democratic president whose only real constituents can be found in corporate boardrooms. I am, however, shocked to have one who seemingly learned nothing from the experience of the Clinton years, who appears to be even more conciliatory than the foolish Please sir, may I have another? Clinton himself was, and who apparently lacks any real instinct even for political self-preservation.
So I have to ask: Hey, Barack. Hows this working out for you? In eight months time youve squandered a massive and historic opportunity. Youve resuscitated a murderously evil political party that, with a little shove in the right direction, might instead have been buried dead forever. Youve let just about anybody say just about anything regarding you and your policies, without consequence. People are running around claiming that youre gonna kill grannies, and millions believe them. Youre being pilloried for the bogus failures of the British healthcare system, and your mealy-mouthed-room-temperature-yesterdays-leftover-oatmeal proposal such that you even have one doesnt even bear the slightest resemblance to the NHS.
Youve produced nothing of consequence in your Hundred Days, nor even in two hundred. Historians will not mention you in the same breath as FDR, but rather right alongside the wondrous Mr. Fillmore. Youve responded to epic crises with half-measures that have produced quarter-results. In the short period of your presidency, your job approval ratings have fallen from the high sixties to the low fifties. In addition to those numbers beginning to look a lot like the guy with a cane walking onto your stage, they represent twice the drop an idiot named George W. Bush sustained during his first eight months in office. Maybe because he accomplished far more in that time. Far more (horrid though it was), as a matter of fact, than you are likely to do in four years, at the rate youre going. Far more, even with a split Congress. How about that, Brother Barack? Youre getting your ass kicked by the worst president in all of American history.
So, dude, hows this working out for you?
For me? Not so good. I was hoping for something else. Know what I mean?
I will say, however, that you seem to be a very, very nice young man. Yes, yes very nice indeed. Definitely.
So much so that I give you my word: If I ever want someone for my president who is so nice that he even lets vicious political savages tear him to shreds while theyre wrecking the country at the same time...
I promise that youll have my vote.
David Michael Green: Ladies and Gentlemen, Barack Obama... Giving Us the Worst of All Worlds
This is well, and right, and just as it should be.
Obama is turning out to be a disastrous president, wholly unsuited for the times and our national and global challenges, and his job approval ratings reflect this.
In Obama, we get all the corporate toadying of the last Democratic president, along with an even greater unwillingness than Clinton and who wouldve thought that was possible to name names, call out enemies, and throw a freakin punch every other year or so. (Were also getting a continuation of the civil rights and civil liberties policies of Dick Cheney, as an extra added bonus, but thats another story.) What makes it even more astonishing this time around, however, is that weve seen this movie before, and we know how it ends. There is apparently absolutely no bottom as the events of recent weeks have reconfirmed to the pit of vicious lies, brutal tactics, and democracy-demolishing antics of which regressives will avail themselves in their practice of contemporary American politics. In addition to not being prepared for that, Barack Obama is still seemingly unable to raise his voice a decibel or two against the very people who are helping him to destroy his own presidency. Indeed, he is negotiating bipartisan (read: total capitulation) deals with them, even as they relentlessly trash him before a national audience.
Is this president so deluded that he believes there are limitations on what the right will do not only to the republic, for which Obama seems to have only passing regard, but also to his presidency, for which we might imagine he would have at least some concern? Does the Kumbaya Kid think that regressives wont seek to annihilate him every bit as much as they did Bill Clinton, even as they are obsessing at this very moment over harebrained conspiracy stories challenging his very legal right to be president, his very citizenship? Does this guy who seems to want, more than anything, for everyone just to be happy and sing along in the same key, still really believe in bipartisanship, at the very moment when the very people with whom he is negotiating are reinforcing the most absurd and inflammatory lies asserting the elder-cide intentions of his health-care bill?...
...One might be excused for beginning to get the feeling that what Obama really wants from healthcare reform is simply to be able to say that he did it. No matter that there is almost no reform in his healthcare reform legislation. No matter that he doesnt even have his own proposal, but is deferring to the worst elements of a legislative body that is a wholly owned subsidiary of American corporate interests. No matter that whatever little effect the legislation will have wont even begin to be seen for another four years, and then will be phased in after that, over yet another period of several years. And no matter that, even after the law goes into effect, this country will continue to suffer from all the major maladies of a system designed principally to provide profits for a few, rather than healthcare for all.
What continues to astonish me, however, is what passes for political calculus in the White House these days. I never assumed that Obama would necessarily be any different from Bill Clinton, in the sense that he might actually have a set of good progressive politics or that he might actually give a damn about the American public. No disappointment there (although did he have to be even worse than that, more like Bush than Clinton?). However, I always assume that almost all politicians are completely consumed by the one thing that Clinton was ever truly passionate about: self-interest.
But, even purely from that narrowest of perspectives, does the Obama team actually believe that their strategy is helping their guy politically? Do they really like the way that their failure to articulate a plan, or even a set of fundamental principles, has worked out in terms of shaping the debate over healthcare? Is it really their belief that they can go to the voters in 2012 and win their hearts with a nothingburger healthcare plan, passed three years prior, and due to fully kick in three years hence? I hate more than a root canal sans novocaine to sound like one of the regressives whom I so very much loathe, but if this is the level of political sophistication to be found in the Obama White House, then, no, as a matter of fact, I really dont want this clown negotiating with Vladimir Putin.
Barack Obama has given us the worst of all worlds. Passage of a healthcare reform bill even something barely remotely worthy of the name now seems like a dubious proposition. If it does pass, it wont be worth squat. Meanwhile, all the ugliest and most deceitful tactics of regressive politics have floated to the surface in the cesspool of American political discourse, weakly countered at best by a White House that could make SpongeBob SquarePants look like the love child of Genghis Khan and Joseph Stalin by comparison, and is so lame that it couldnt anticipate and inoculate against these assaults that any fool who wasnt entirely comatose over the last three decades could plainly see were coming. Worst of all, when the smoke finally clears, this debacle will entail a massive discrediting of so-called liberalism, and a severe imperiling of the Democratic Party (not that it much matters) in the next two election cycles. Think about that for a second. How absolutely, utterly, magnificently inept does one have to be to have revived the hopes of the GOP, a mere 200 days after George W. Bush and Dick Cheney left office? Not just any idiot could pull off a stunt that big, I tell ya. A job like that requires a world-class moron.
What Obama should have done is simple, and therefore all the more astonishing that they missed it. First off, he should have formulated a serious plan (perhaps in faux negotiations with certain key congressional leaders, to make them feel powerful and included, perhaps not), and stuck with it. At the very least, he should have articulated three or four non-negotiable key principles that he demanded from any healthcare legislation. These should have revolved around ideas that are simple to grasp and clearly beneficial to non-elite Americans. He should have sold that plan at big staged events, such as televised addresses to both houses of Congress rather than these pathetic press conferences he keeps giving, where the press can ask any question they want, and where an unscripted Professor Wonk rambles out ten minute answers, chock full of pauses and clauses, guaranteed to anesthetize his audience or divert their attention entirely, to another subject altogether (can you say Henry Lewis Gates?).
He should have named enemies, right from the beginning. He should have warned Americans about what these people would do in the ensuing weeks and months. And he should have called them out on it, angrily and by name, when they in fact did it. When they started lying and frightening senior citizens in order to protect their legalized scams from reform, he should have slugged them so hard they were knocked on their fat corporate asses, never to rise again. He shouldve called them greedy, selfish, treasonous traitors who are willing to lie and steal to further enrich their bloated selves, while tens of thousands of Americans die every year from lack of medical care.
Above all, what Obama should have done was shown some passion. The unflappable conciliatory professor act has got to go. Heres a newsflash (evidently) for the Obama White House: If the president has any desire to sell his policies, hes got to sell his policies. If he wants to lead, he has to lead. And if he wants our support, hes got to tell us why this is important. With juice. Mr. Folksy isnt getting it not by a long shot.
Finally, Obama shouldve jammed his plan down the throats of Congress, where though youd never know it his party commands massive and filibuster-proof majorities. I dont know about anyone else, but I dont think the nineteenth century model of the presidency is particularly appropriate here in the twenty-first. We got Social Security and the rest of the New Deal programs because Franklin Roosevelt twisted arms on Capitol Hill. We got Medicare and Medicaid and civil rights because Lyndon Johnson nearly pulled those arms out of their sockets, jamming his bills through a reluctant Congress by means of big carrots, bigger sticks, and razor-sharp strategy.
What did Millard Fillmore get? James Buchanan? If you cant remember, dont worry it doesnt mean that youre deficient as a student of American history. It just means that they didnt get anything worth remembering. Why is it that, in our time, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush get everything they want from Congress, while Bill Clinton and Barack Obama even after theyve completely sold out to Wall Street, and even when they have massive majorities in Congress wind up as if theyre the main source of entertainment for the fellas on Cell Block D? Neither FDR nor Harry Truman nor Lyndon Johnson would recognize the Democratic Party anymore. Unless they inadvertently mistook it for a squashed bug in the foyer of the GOPs headquarters.
Having lived through the incredibly dismal Clinton era, Im not exactly surprised to have another Democratic president whose only real constituents can be found in corporate boardrooms. I am, however, shocked to have one who seemingly learned nothing from the experience of the Clinton years, who appears to be even more conciliatory than the foolish Please sir, may I have another? Clinton himself was, and who apparently lacks any real instinct even for political self-preservation.
So I have to ask: Hey, Barack. Hows this working out for you? In eight months time youve squandered a massive and historic opportunity. Youve resuscitated a murderously evil political party that, with a little shove in the right direction, might instead have been buried dead forever. Youve let just about anybody say just about anything regarding you and your policies, without consequence. People are running around claiming that youre gonna kill grannies, and millions believe them. Youre being pilloried for the bogus failures of the British healthcare system, and your mealy-mouthed-room-temperature-yesterdays-leftover-oatmeal proposal such that you even have one doesnt even bear the slightest resemblance to the NHS.
Youve produced nothing of consequence in your Hundred Days, nor even in two hundred. Historians will not mention you in the same breath as FDR, but rather right alongside the wondrous Mr. Fillmore. Youve responded to epic crises with half-measures that have produced quarter-results. In the short period of your presidency, your job approval ratings have fallen from the high sixties to the low fifties. In addition to those numbers beginning to look a lot like the guy with a cane walking onto your stage, they represent twice the drop an idiot named George W. Bush sustained during his first eight months in office. Maybe because he accomplished far more in that time. Far more (horrid though it was), as a matter of fact, than you are likely to do in four years, at the rate youre going. Far more, even with a split Congress. How about that, Brother Barack? Youre getting your ass kicked by the worst president in all of American history.
So, dude, hows this working out for you?
For me? Not so good. I was hoping for something else. Know what I mean?
I will say, however, that you seem to be a very, very nice young man. Yes, yes very nice indeed. Definitely.
So much so that I give you my word: If I ever want someone for my president who is so nice that he even lets vicious political savages tear him to shreds while theyre wrecking the country at the same time...
I promise that youll have my vote.
David Michael Green: Ladies and Gentlemen, Barack Obama... Giving Us the Worst of All Worlds
