We can make history here at DU!

[peace13]

I suggest that DU host a petition requesting that all Obama supporters, campaign volunteers and contributors sign. A request that Obama step forward and present a health care package for all Americans, be it Medicare for all, low cost group policies, or a straight public option. He can decide as long as it covers all Americans. The signatures will let him know that his base, his supporters, his legs on the ground are calling him out. We can contact Keith,Rachel and Stewart to help get the word out. We can use the Obama network that exists as the springboard. If volunteers go to their email lists from last fall and send out the notice we can get every volunteer to reach out and touch Obama with the same neighbor to neighbor grid that helped put him where he is today. We can open it up to all Americans who want the President to succeed.

You might think this is not possible.... to hard...too much like work. If we don't start somewhere we will never get anywhere.

[PATRICK]

1. It could be broadened to

an all or something plan, presenting the public BOTH with medicare for all or an equally blunt popular plan, AND separate House bills(as suggested lately by House members) to accomplish some reforms piecemeal. The double assault would have worked while consuming all the oxygen out of the opposition. It can still work although the potential for current party leadership to try anything workable seems doomed in the cradle. it can be offered as a substitute for handwringing and resignation to getting pared down to even lamer ducks in 201o than they are inexplicably(by rational or bluntly political considerations) acting now. All or something. Can be done as they have done many things this year with much less political capital to show for it.

Robert Reich even reduces it to a last line of political rationality about simply creating jobs instead- if they can do nothing else, but I suspect on the same deaf ears stuffed with corporate newspapers and cash. The "or else" time is at hand but a good response from this type of party leadership is not easily hoped for.

[peace13]

2. I don't know.

I sense that Obama is moving farther and farther away from his supporters. If he could see the lists of names, his lists in fact, at the bottom of a request for him to produce an honest effort to solve this heath care issue, we could make an impact on the solution.

I am not a big fan of watering down the proposal. These politicians have wasted so much time and have come up with nothing viable to date. They can easily fritter away fthree more years while families lose everything including their loved ones. We don't have a lot of time for revisions along I fear.

[PATRICK]

3. It seemed to me

(without any inside knowledge at all to back it up of course)that Obama had turned to HCR legislation outside the rhetoric of campaign promises to a Clinton adviser retry. Like any defeated adversary they thought to "have learned from their technical mistakes" and made new ones while restoring false paradigms of the past, and included rough handling of the "unrealistic" desires of the left. It was fought out better and almost decisively on the replay but greater opportunities were frittered away in both tactics and goals. And the main battle was lost all over again with the typical blinders, all over again under the same house rules favoring corporations.

Like Clinton they might have to swallow defeat and consider the entire issue lost. That is the old panic of being past losers come to haunt this strangely chicken Dem majority. It seems to me they could still redo this whole HCR reform on two simpler prongs, offering genuine people reforms bill by bill while pushing medicare for all as both a financial and total reform answer to the entire mess, wiping their hands of bipartisan outreach to corporate influence. Their dilemma they seem to think is in losing the huge chunks of corporate donations- now that they have stupidly made themselves more vulnerable and dependent. Like any playoff champs who consistently lose the Big Game they may doggedly pursue the path of ultimate defeat- with the people they supposedly champion as the big losers.