When I saw the CNN ticker scrolling — “Is Health Care Obama’s Waterloo?” — the neurotic Democrat in me pulled up a chair, poured a big cup of coffee, and announced that he’ll be sticking around awhile.
And I though of this article by Neal Gabler in the Boston Globe:
Obviously, we face daunting problems, but we nevertheless continue to operate with a kind of hopefulness that we will meet the challenges and triumph. Historically, we have reason to feel this way. In the last 70 years , this country faced down the Great Depression, Nazism, and Jim Crow. The system, however balky and tardy it may have been, has always worked.
But today, beneath the optimistic rhetoric, lurks another possibility that no politician and few pundits want to admit: that the system is no longer up to the task and that the factors that once brought relief are no longer operable. There is the real possibility that this time we will not win but rather founder the way Japan has done since its economic catastrophe. There is the possibility that this time it is hopeless.
The article outlines four reasons why Obama, who, despite predictably slipping poll numbers remains widely popular, is finding it almost impossible to get anything done.
- Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel was only partly right when he argued that crisis creates opportunity. Crisis creates pain. It’s the pain that creates the opportunity, when people demand change. And while there is plenty of pain to go around in the U.S. right now, with unemployment hovering near 10 percent, that’s nowhere near the 25 percent unemployment that enabled Roosevelt to enact his New Deal agenda. “President Roosevelt had the advantage of an angry citizenry who wanted him to do anything to rescue them,” Gabler writes. ”Obama has the disadvantage of a passive citizenry that, frankly, may never hurt enough to demand what might finally cure what ails them.”
- FDR also didn’t have to deal with 40,000 lobbyists, pulling each and every piece of legislation in equal and opposite directions. “In the last year nearly 2,500 began lobbying on the single issue of climate change,” Gabler notes. ”By a political Newton’s Law, every action has an equal and opposite reaction, which means that there are thousands of thrusts and parries on any major piece of legislation – a sure prescription for inaction or for tepid action.”
- Moreover, while FDR certainly had his enemies in the media, he faced nothing like the 24-7 media onslaught that a modern-day president absorbs. And it’s not the right-wing media that is the problem; just as often is the so-called mainstream, “whose baseline [is] skepticism about any possible government initiative.” The problem, Gabler writes, is “the mainstream media with their own attachment to the status quo, their own loaded questions about dramatic new policies and their predilection to identify potential missteps rather than to extol potential boldness.” (To wit: Is health care Obama’s Waterloo?)
- The Founding Fathers built our political institutions — the House, the Senate, the executive branch, the Supreme Court — to prevent drastic change and promote incrementalism, but they never imagined a political party “dedicated to total obstructionism.” Gabler notes that from 1927 to 1962, there were only 11 cloture votes invoked to end filibusters in the Senate. “In 2007 alone,” he writes, ”with Republicans trying to derail initiatives in the Democratic Congress as disparate as an increased minimum wage, a climate change bill, campaign finance reform, and an energy bill, there were 62 cloture votes.” This, he argues, renders the seemingly steep Democratic majority in the Senate meaningless. “It is the Republican lurch rightward that has purged [the] few [GOP] moderates and gamed the filibuster so that any piece of legislation is now held hostage to 40 votes,” he notes. ”This generates cries for bipartisanship, neglecting the fact that there is one party adamantly opposed to any change whatsoever.”
Gabler’s conclusion is pretty chilling:
And so we are now a nation with great professions of faith that we will succeed but little real confidence that we will, a nation that focuses more on what can go wrong than on what can go right, a nation that can’t seem to get action. We are a timid nation with small dreams and even smaller plans – a nation that seems to have lost its capacity to do big things. We all know the nation is broken, but we may no longer have the will or the institutions to fix it.
Obama has a press conference at 8 p.m. tonight. I imagine he’ll try to regain the upper hand on health care. But remember what Franklin Roosevelt said: “No government can help the destinies of people who insist in putting sectional and class consciousness ahead of general weal.”
Stay tuned.
Tags: FDR, Neal Gabler
People tend to vote their pocketbooks, so class consciousness goes along with that. I think the majority (who have insurance) are worried about what it might do to their wallets to pay for it and their current insurance. And despite assurances that the answer is “nothing,” changes begets change. It is hard to know where this will go, for sure. Even supporters of universal healthcare in theory are nervous in practice.
Hey, Danny,
Thanks for posting!
Here’s what I think is wrong with health care: It’s incomprehensible. I know a lot of very smart people who couldn’t tell you the first thing about what’s wrong, or what’s being proposed to fix it. It therefore lacks a voting constituency, and makes it very easy for opponents to malign. (The millions who don’t have insurance aren’t a natural voting bloc; not to mention, I mean — they can go to the emergency room, right?)
Obama so far has not found a way to move beyond professor mode to speak to people clearly and directly about why they should get behind this. I used to think he could appeal to two groups: those who have been denied coverage, and those who have insurance, but who suddenly found themselves inundated by medical bills anyway. I no longer think that will work.
Ultimately, I think maybe his best argument is that it’s a moral issue: people have a right to decent medical care that they do not ever have to worry about losing. And if we do nothing, because of runaway medical costs, we are bankrupting our children’s children.
Keep it simple, professor.
-ND