The first blogger I’ve read who said that Obama is more than what meets the eyes was Andrew Sullivan. Drawing from a lot of evidences during the 2008 primaries, Sullivan believed Obama is much smarter and much more savvy in political maneuvering than people often credited him.
The recent health care rancor in Congress once again called into question that assessment. Is Obama in control of the matter? Is his Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel in control? The White House, after all, was losing the message of health care reform as a a good thing. The Republicans had been gaining a lot of traction denouncing the reform as another step toward socialism. Sullivan, on many blog posts regarding the subject, expressed a lot frustration with the Congressional Democrats and their lack of spines. A lot of progressive bloggers and commentators believed the same. But what separated them from Sullivan is that he never doubted Obama. Enter the latest phase of the health care debate.
For weeks the House Republicans had been drumming loudly on having cameras during the health care debate. They brought up the issue to Obama, citing that he campaigned for it during the 2008 bid. They wondered if he had walked away from it since then. They backed this assumption with two major back room deals, derisively called the “Louisiana Purchase” and the “Cornhusker Kickback,” to get Sens. Mary Landrieu and Ben Nelson on with the health care deal. They said these two deals, outrageous at face value, should be what Obama campaigned against. And they have a point. Enter the Obama Ninja.
The president announced recently that he would open a health care summit and invite both the Democratic and the Republican Parties to attend. They would hash out their differences, presenting ideas to move forward from the current deadlock, on live TV. Here he answered the GOP’s most poignant objective. A debate, on live TV, for the public to see. And the Republicans looked confused. Their bluffs called. Their strategy to embarrass him had failed. He was willing to engage them on TV, and is poised to make them look aloof and dumb just like what he did at the recent party retreat. So now some of the elements within the GOP are expressing reservation that they were being set-up for a public pie-throwing.
I don’t blame them for thinking it is all political theater. What I expected from them, right from the beginning, is some sense on what they should do and not what they have been doing. The GOP, for the last year and until now, had been playing the opposition party. Everything from them had been reactionary, and one-liners. Now they are in a bind because Obama called their bluffs. He had been a Ninja while they thought he was a peacenik.
The problem I have with the GOP is that up until now they have been wagering a fight without substance. I would support their causes if their concerns were better explained, and less dogmatic. For instance, if the reform will as bad as they claim it to be, what would be the alternatives and how would that fit with the real world situation? The problem with their concerns is how the prescriptions of their solutions. They GOP had been using tax cuts like some sort of magic bullet for all things awry in this society. The more they promoted tax cuts as the only viable option, the more they sound to me as pathetic one-trick mules.
Another problem with the GOP’s solution, especially with the “tort reform,” is how those solutions had been debunked roundly. On tort reform, Atul Gwande, a practitioner of surgery, penned a must-read piece in the New Yorker that precisely downplayed the effectiveness of tort reform. The example in that piece was a town named McAllen, Texas. The town already got a tort reform in place and yet its average spending on health care was among the highest in the nation. What is the GOP’s answer to that? So far, honestly, I could not find a cogent, data-driven rebuttal.
Another rebuttal to the tort reform came from Andrew Cohen this week. Cohen wrote that the reform’s main aim is to limit the monetary reward given out to the plaintiffs who was suing doctors for malpractices. The problem with the reform is that it is undemocratic. Those issuing the awards are not the life-time appointed judges or the high-price class action lawyer, but the juries. Nightingale, my go-to gal on all things corporate laws, would agree that the jury is an essential in the justice system because they serve as the most human and public reminder that laws have real consequences. Furthermore, the American legal system insists that the jury to be part of the cogs and wheels because no one can feel your pain and grief like one of your “peers.” Tort reform is undemocratic because it tells your peers how they should feel. That is wrong. Does the GOP have any answer to this?
Not yet. I’ll keep looking and hope they will address this during the TV debate or in any other press release but I doubt it.
Tagged: America, health care