There was recently a very good article on Tom Daschle's conflict-of-interest insurance and pharmaceutical industry lobbying, and who the clients are, etc., by the New York Times on August 23rd, at
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/23/health/policy/23daschle.html . Daschle is self-described during the article as "the architect of the President's health plan," and is the inventor of the "trigger" charade, that would effectively kill all public style plans, by never allowing the public option to be deemed called-for by commercial industry not meeting its obligations. Rachel Maddow has exposed this by having the writer David Sirota on to explain it, and this routine has been used before to kill legislation.
I now believe--as many do--that the whole "we need bi-partisanship" routine is wholly and completely a corporate lobbyist propaganda campaign; it was never even "stupid but sincere." First they narrow their known-universe down to their own group, Congress, where the entire spectrum of thought can be summed up with the words "both sides of the aisle," "both sides," then having shut everybody else out, they pretend that adherance to the corrupt little corporate club of vested interests that Congress (and the White House) has become, is actually an attempt to expand to include "all" ranges of opinion. The whole time, all their alliances with each other were private, individual corporate deals they were making amongst themselves. I have even come to the conclusion that the disruptions at all the health care town hall meetings during August, were either deliberately planned, or if not, then were welcomed anyway--by corporate Democrats even. They completely derailed the issue, made it impossible for the REAL anger and overwhelming popular opinion to be expressed--the one where the American people tell nightmare stories about out of control prices, denied care, and being cut off insurance--and replaced it with corporate slogans about "death panels" and other unanswerable things that don't make any sense.
The recent one with that phony, Steny Hoyer, is what convinced me. You might remember that Hoyer has been one of the blocks in the House, killing a Medicare style program on behalf of corporate interests; I have listened to early town halls, before all this "organized" crap, where Hoyer has lectured nurses and doctors, that there will be no songle-payer or public plan, "we don't have the votes" line, etc. (How can you "not have the votes" when 80% of the American people are begging you for this? YOU are stopping it.) Then, at one of the recent town halls with all the yelling, etc., Hoyer spent the whole time "trying to reassure" the audience that it would NOT be "liberal," NOT be "socialism," and after a while I started to wonder what the fuck this phony liar is acting this way for. Especially when Hoyer went on and on about "I know you are worried about taxes" and "costs," when that has not been the popular outrage at all--we are ALREADY being bled to death, BY CORPORATIONS. The focus now becomes, "Don't worry, I won't be a liberal"; deliberate.
Remember when they first propsed bailing out the Wall St. speculaor/brokers, and were overwhelmed with millions of phone calls, e-messages, and other contacts, some 95% against it--then all of a sudden they got calls that were supporting it, and so they told us all the "we" had changed our minds and now supported the bailout, which they then did? Then it came out that the pro-bailout flurry of calls at the end, were all traceable to Washington, D.C. lobbying firm phone numbers--Bernie Sanders said this on the floor of the Senate, for example--but it had already been done. Same thing here; this whole situation is very bad.