http://www.huffingtonpost.com/drew-westen/why-the-president-has-bee_b_278971.htmlJust read it
by John Aravosis (DC) on 9/08/2009 09:31:00 AM
It's about Obama and health care reform, and how he got where he is, and what he should do now. It's long, and worth every word. I had so many paragraphs that I originally excerpted, I finally gave up and deleted them all, save these three. Read this piece. It's brilliant.
http://www.americablog.com/2009/09/just-read-it.html........................
Drew Westen
Psychologist and neuroscientist; Emory University Professor
Posted: September 7, 2009 11:37 PM
Why the President Has Been Losing on Health Care, and What He Needs to Say
The way to win the center is not to continue firing gay Arabic speakers in the armed services and comparing their sexual orientation to bestiality. It is not to issue center-right proclamations at Notre Dame about the need to decrease abortions while failing to mention that the best way to do that is to teach our children about birth control and make it available to people whether they are rich or poor, so they can decide for themselves when to start their families. It is not to continue the policy of sending terrorism suspects to countries friendly to torture. The way to win the center is not to stay silent as right-wing militia members circle Obama's own town hall meetings and speeches with loaded weapons that most law-abiding gun owners find abhorrent. The way to win the center is not to coach Supreme Court nominees to mouth conservative legal philosophies that would have prevented Brown v. Board of Education or Roe v. Wade and to tell civil rights leaders to stay silent as conservatives stoke the flames of white resentment by offering the New Haven firefighters case during the Sotomayor hearings as Exhibit A of quotas and "reverse discrimination" (when it was actually an example of neither). And the way to win the center is not to express condescension toward those who elected him, dismissing their concerns about his apparent willingness to compromise on virtually any issue of principle, including genuine health care reform, as "getting all wee-weed up," when in fact it is his messaging team that is pissing away the best chance in 70 years to effect real change in America--whether in health care, banking, or energy....
There is no doubt the President can get a compromise health care plan through Congress. He has enormous majorities in both the House and Senate, and they all know the stakes. But doing so would leave him with a compromised Presidency, in which a small minority of Republican lawmakers knows they can bully him at will into half-measures on any issue, and that he'll settle for Pyrrhic victories with the rationalization that he has achieved incremental change.
But
the American people didn't vote for "small change we can believe in." And I don't think that's what this President wants--or needs--to be his legacy. Whatever the merits of the "public option," it has come to stand for something much larger: Whether this President really means what he says, and whether he's going to put the public interest over the private interests that dominate Washington and have dominated health care for far too long. We'll probably know Wednesday night.
more:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/drew-westen/why-the-president-has-bee_b_278971.html
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