Are Liberal Netroots Groups Helping Obama Fail?

[Karmadillo]

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/07/30-9

Published on Thursday, July 30, 2009 by CommonDreams.org
Are Liberal Netroots Groups Helping Obama Fail?
by Jeff Cohen

<edit>

I’m talking about the increasingly-urgent emails coming for weeks from liberal Netroots groups calling for a “public option” for healthcare – a government insurance plan citizens could choose to PAY FOR instead of private insurance.

Never has so much passion been so misdirected. If what these liberal groups ultimately wanted out of President Obama and corporate-funded Democrats in Congress was a topnotch public plan to compete with the first-rate private plans, the wrong way to get it was to make that THE demand.

Especially of a President whose instinct is toward conciliation and splitting the difference with big business and the rightwing.

<edit>

Activists must recognize the surest way to get a strong public option that could compete with the Cadillac of health plans. We needed to mobilize millions of Netroots people, almost every union and 150 members of Congress to endorse a maximum demand: National health insurance . . . enhanced Medicare for All. In other words, a cost-effective single-payer system of publicly-financed, privately-delivered healthcare that ends private health insurance (and its waste, bureaucracy, ads, sales commissions, lavish executive salaries, profiteering).

Had liberal groups sent out millions of emails building a movement that posed an existential threat to the health insurance industry, Sen. Baucus and Blue Dog Democrats and their corporate healthcare patrons might well be on their knees begging for a comprehensive public option – to avert the threat of full-blown Medicare for All.

As things stand now, as writers like Bob Kuttner and Norman Solomon have warned, a weak public option would institutionalize a two-tiered system with healthier, wealthier citizens getting the best (private) plans, and sicker, harder-to-treat people getting an inferior (public) plan. Newt Gingrich couldn’t dream up a better scenario to discredit an enhanced government role in healthcare.

more...

[ixion]

1. In my opinion, Obama is failing the netroots

not the other way around.

[stillrockin]

2. what you said.

[MNDemNY]

5. Here, too.

[Echo In Light]

24. And wasn't deemed "electable" by corporate/state nexus to sabotage vested interests

In other words, there was never any real intention of implementing universal healthcare coverage.

[AllentownJake]

3. Last time I checked

The netroots didn't campaign to become President.

[Orsino]

22. And last time I checked...

Congress wrote the bills for the president to sign.

I don't mind knocking on the president for failing to lead us (so far) to the promised land, as long as we start with the acknowledgment of Congress' deep corruption and inertia.

[asdjrocky]

4. Typical.

Why do I feel like a rape victim being blamed for being raped. What crap.

[MNDemNY]

7. More like a rape victim being blamed for not "giving it up".

[asdjrocky]

8. Yeah, if I just shut up and lay there it will be over soon.

The way I see it, with health care I've got another 20 to 30 years, without it, who knows? So it will be over sooner, if I just shut up and don't complain about my station in life.

[MNDemNY]

10. Now your on the bandwagon!

[asdjrocky]

14. Finally!

Am I a good American now? Is Iraq responsible for 9/11?

[MNDemNY]

20. Of course Iraq was behind 9-11, but to answer your other question:

Can I see your birth certificate?

[cali]

9. I've been raped. this is not like being raped. And somehow I doubt that you've

had that horrible experience.

[MNDemNY]

11. .

:shrug: C'mon.

[asdjrocky]

12. How's this cali, I feel like I'm being fucked over real hard one more time.

I'll be more careful with my metaphors in the future, ok with you?

[cali]

15. thank you. it's just that comparing a lousy political reality to rape

just isn't a good metaphor.

[Walk away]

18. That's fineif you think that your insurance company not paying ...

for the cancer treatments you need to stay alive is a political reality. I have experienced both and they are both terrifying and life shattering. It's fine with me if anyone wants to use the "rape" word to make a point when it's serious enough.

[asdjrocky]

19. I hear you.

It's not like I'm incapable of being trained. As always, thanks for the heads up and on behalf of decent men everywhere, I'm so sorry.

[Beacool]

17. I'm sorry Cali.

As a woman I can just imagine how terrible that experience must have been for you. I have a friend in her 50s who was raped as a teenager in the 1960s and she still gets bouts of depression.

A big hug goes out to you........

:hug:

[JHB]

6. That title is a bit misleading (but that's the one Common Dreams gave it)...

...in that Cohen's point is that failure is the inevitable outcome of Obama's "conciliatory, split the difference" approach when the opposition does not want any change and will fight dirty to maintain the status quo.

Liberal netroots groups are "helping" him to fail mainly in the sense that they aren't following Roosevelt's advice ("go out there and MAKE me do it") and being hardline enough.

[Phoebe Loosinhouse]

13. I have seen it repeatedly here and elsewhere that the first mistake was not

leaving single payer on the table. But President Obama did that, not the netroots. The netroots advocated/advocates the opposite.

"The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars, but in ourselves if we are underlings."

That is the point the of the article. We didn't push hard enough, especially since as the article points out we happen to have a President who I believe is accurately described "whose instinct is towards conciliation and splitting the difference with big business and the rightwing."

[bread_and_roses]

16. the writer is correct - though Obama bears his share of culpability as well

with his endless, meaningless, "bi-partisanship." But we were stupid to come to the table with our lowest possible offer, and many of us said so from the start.

[kentuck]

21. Very interesting question.

But I think the liberal net roots are helping President Obama survive at the moment. They are not helping him fail but they cannot prevent him from failing.

[John Q. Citizen]

23. All I know was when I showed up at a meeting in January on health care, the

people who showed up all wanted to talk about single payer.

The Union (SEIU), the local Democratic organizations, the DNC representative all put the kibosh on that talk and wanted to talk about something new, they wanted to talk about "public option."

I didn't buy it then as a strategy and I don't buy it now as a strategy. I raised all the issues in the Common dreams article back then in January but to no avail.


It's obvious that what happened was at the end of November Obama, the Union President, The house Speaker, The Senate Majority Leader, some key congress committee chairs and reps from the health care industrial Complex all met in some room and decided that Single payer would be verboten - off the table- and out of the debate. This decision was then passed down to various so-called "grass-roots" organizations like DFA, Move-on, union state organizations and locals, etc.

This was a top down co-ordinated decision. One need look no farther than the report issued by the transition team to see that single payer was also skillfully side stepped and minimized in that document as well.

Basically the whole health care struggle has been a top down kabuki theater charade that the American People have been excluded from in every meaningful way since day 1.

I say "fuck that!"