By now you’ve heard plenty about how President Obama is backing away from insisting on a public-option insurance program as a key element of health care reform.
The spectacle is one of Obama and congressional Democrats caving in to Blue Dogs and nervous Nellies of their own party, and worse, capitulating to the Party of No and its orchestrated whiners and hell raisers.
This might be exactly what it appears to be: Obama selling out to some senators who seem to have sold out to health insurance and other corporate interests. But as we’ll explain, there could be more going on.
During a town-hall meeting in Colorado Saturday, President Obama said:
The public option, whether we have it or we don’t have it, is not the entirety of health care reform. This is just one sliver of it, one aspect of it.”
Sunday, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said a public option isn’t “an essential element” of health care reform.
Clearly, the White House was up to something. But what?
Two possibilities come to mind. One is that the administration is trying for some Clinton-style triangulation. The other is that it just floated a trial balloon.
Health care reform opponents and their outrageous fearmongering about death panels, people dying while awaiting medical care in Canada, etc., have dominated the news lately — with plenty of help from right-wing-friendly media such as Fox News and CNN. Be-addled oldsters who won’t even be affected, itinerant anti-government hell raisers and drooling dipsticks willing to shout angrily at a member of Congress in a public forum are commonplace on news/talk shows.
This overpublicized tantrum-throwing has created a general impression most Americans are fearful, angry and confused. They are widely thought to believe health care reform means a government takeover of medical care, rationing, forced euthanasia and utter destruction of commercial health insurance companies.
No surprise, then, that a recent poll showed many Americans losing confidence in Obama’s handling of health care reform.
Obama can’t very well urge Democrats who favor reform with a public option to get out and raise more hell than the Astroturf againsters who’ve hijacked the debate. It would smack of Bush-style firing up the base by accentuating partisan and ideological differences. After all, Obama ran for president on trying to put that kind of thing behind us.
However, by signaling he might give up on the public option, Obama could have been trying to stir up a public outcry from the left and middle — a reaction big and irate enough to shift media attention away from the anti-reform noisemakers.
Such a ruckus might also persuade some wayward Democrats in Congress that they had better rethink their opposition to real reform with a public option.
We don’t claim this is what’s going on, just that it’s a possibility.
Another possibility is that the White House is trying to gauge how much trouble it might cause for itself on the left if it really were to deep-six the public option.
Whatever was behind last weekend’s sudden buzz about Obama shying away from the public option, it was deliberate and done for some specific purpose.
That’s what I’m hoping, that this “retreat” on the public option is a trial balloon. Aside from seeing how the Left reacts, it’s also revealing the Right’s true colors. Those “co-ops” — which Republicans have been screaming for as an alternative to the public option — are already in the Republicans’ crosshairs, now that they think they’ve defeated the public option. The public needs to be made aware that the Republicans want absolutely no reform at all, but they don’t have the ‘nads to come out and say it. So they’re trying to defeat health care reform incrementally.
I keep hoping Obama is using that Rope-A-Dope strategy on the Republicans. If he is, it’s time for some serious countermoves.
Yeah, SW & Tom, I keep waiting for the gloves to come off. I think it is at least partly an attempt to electrify the left, because he backed off those statements yesterday. It seems to be part of his m.o.
I think it was a trial balloon. All of a sudden the Dems are getting fired up and showing up at the town hall meetings.
Tom, Bee, watching Obama’s Organize For America forum today, it was same ‘ol about the public option: you could hear he’s all for it and you could hear it’s highly expendable. He said both.
What Obama carefully did not do was exercise leadership about it. It’s as though he sees himself as emcee of the Miss America pageant, being oh so careful not to show undue favor to any one contestant.
I’m trying to remember when a president got away with being a diplomatic fence sitter on a big, contentious issue such as this. I can’t come up with anything.
S.W. – It’s hard to figure out what the strategy might be, trial balloon, testing the waters etc., at this stage in the game I am just hoping that there is a strategy.
Like Bee I am waiting for the real fight to start, gloves off time.
A couple of days ago, Mrs. Snave and I were watching CNN “Headline News” and the lead story was about the possibility of Obama “ramming through a health care plan” with some kind of maneuver called reconciliation that would make it so it only required 51 votes to pass. Apparently Bush used this route to pass some of his “tax cuts”…
Why would CNN use emotionally-charged language like “ramming a health care plan thr0ugh” instead of saying something more neutral like “using a special procedure to pass a health care plan”? I had always thought CNN HLN was fairly neutral, but since Obama got elected I believe they have been less than objective.
Re. the topic of S.W.’s post, I also believe Obama was floating a trial balloon. And that maybe CNN HLN was unwittingly floating a trial balloon for the administration with their “ramming it through” stuff. To their credit, they took viewer comments and there were some good ones from people who wanted what they thought they were getting when they voted for Obama… that is, yes, it’s time to go ahead with this whether Republican leaders are on board with it or not.
Holte, I just hope there is an effective strategy beyond doing town halls.
Snave, I gave up on CNN HLN years ago, when it went all infotainment. I followed the 2004 election very closely. CNN was grossly biased, obviously a conduit for GOP talking points, right-wing talking heads and Bush promoters. Wolf Blitzer alone carried enough water for Bush & Co. to float a battleship. John King was even worse.
I expect HLN was just as bad then and remains so today. What I don’t know is whether CNN is so biased because of political preference, because the network is managed by southerners or because CNN is trying to draw off some of Fox News’ audience. It’s probably some combination of those things.