Neurotic Democrat

For awhile, I’ve been doing my best to keep the health care debate in perspective. We are extremely fortunate to live in a time and place where the debate over health care is our most serious, inflaming issue. Most of us in this country have some measure of personal security. We are not hungry. We have access to good medicine. Bombs are not shredding our public squares.

Last week, I blogged about how the Republicans are being hypocritical by not forcefully responding to those comparing Obama to Hitler. (And some in the GOP are actually making these comparisons, themselves.)

Well, the Hitler parade continues.

In this video, a man praising the Israeli national health care system is interrupted by a woman shouting “Heil Hitler.” Watch the video. It’s one of the most upsetting things I’ve seen in a very long time.

In this video, Rep. Barney Frank, a Jew, confronts a woman at a town hall who, toting a picture of Obama defaced to look like Hitler, demands to know why Frank supports Obama’s “Nazi” policies. (“Ma’am,” Frank says, ”trying to have a conversation with you would be like trying to argue with a dining room table.  I have no interest in doing it.”)

In an article in the News-Record of Greensboro, Rabbi Fred Guttman writes of confronting a man at a health care rally who carried a sign reading: “ObamaCare = NationalSocialism” (aka Naziism).

Where is the Republican outrage as this wave of ugliness washes over our Democracy? Where is the demand that Rush Limbaugh cease and desist his ugly comparisons between Obama’s administration and the Nazis? Where are the brave Republicans who — like the brave Israeli in the video, and Barney Frank, and Rabbi Guttman — have the guts to get in the face of these despicable hatemongers and shout: Enough!

Really, lady castigating Barney Frank at the mic? Obama is Hitler?

Rabbi Guttman writes:

When I lived in Israel, I had the opportunity to meet on several occasions with a woman named Ruth Eliaz, an Auschwitz survivor.

Most pregnant women and women with young children were sent directly to the gas chambers as soon as the cattle car transports arrived at Auschwitz. Ruth, pregnant at the time, wasn’t showing and was selected to be a worker. As her pregnancy continued, she tried her best to cover her stomach, knowing that if she were to be discovered, she would be sent directly to the gas chamber. Eventually the pregnancy could not be hidden any longer. Ruth was taken to the infamous Nazi doctor, Josef Mengele.

In Auschwitz, Mengele conducted horrific experiments on Jews. Mengele told Ruth that he had something special in mind for her and that he would allow her to continue the pregnancy to term. After Ruth gave birth to a baby boy, she began to breast-feed the child. Mengele had her brought to him, whereupon he strapped her to a gurney and injected her breasts with poison so she would not be able to feed her baby. The purpose of this “experiment” was to see how long a newborn baby could live without being fed. After several days of seeing her child suffer, Ruth could stand it no longer and smothered her own child.

I am starting to believe this debate over health care is no longer a “luxury” — a national conversation that we are lucky to be having, regardless of how it turns out. I am starting to see this as a new fight for the very soul of our country.

Is ours a nation where Republicans and their supporters can tacitly sanction widespread comparison between Obama and the regime that injected poison into a new mother’s breasts, forcing her to murder he own child?

Hate health care. Shout all you want about why you think government run insurance amounts to Socialism. Scream and bellow and stomp your feet. But do not, in willful ignorance, cheapen the memory of the 6 million who died. And don’t stand idly by, out of fear or embarassment or political expediencey, and let it proceed.

Jose Saramago, the Nobel Laureate, wrote a book about this kind of thinking. It’s called “Blindness,” and it does not end well.

“Do we have enough strength for the task, asked the girl with dark glasses,” Saramago writes, “The question is not whether we have enough strength, the question is whether we can allow ourselves to leave this woman here, Certainly not, said the doctor, Then the strength must be found.”

The other day, I wrote a post, asking if Obama’s supporters were really content to cede the debate over health care to the shouting, Fox News loving, anti-government Americans.

Maureen Dowd, in her column today, puts a finer point on it.

The young grass-roots army that swept Obama into office has yet to mobilize now that the fight is about something complicated rather than a charismatic hope-monger. No, they can’t?

Instead of a multicultural tableau of beaming young idealists on screen, we see ugly scenes of mostly older and white malcontents, disrupting forums where others have come to actually learn something. Instead of hope, we get swastikas, death threats and T-shirts proclaiming “Proud Member of the Mob.”

She’s on to something. Pardon the pun, but health care is not black and white. The topic of health care is vast, dense, and absurdly complicated. I myself have doubts about the wisdom of a public option, just as I have doubts about the wisdom of a private health care coop — or just about any other alternative.

The administration says that under all circumstances, individuals will be able to keep their current health care arrangement if they want to. Here’s Obama, to the American Medical Association in June:

“If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor, period. If you like your health care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health care plan, period. No one will take it away, no matter what.”

But that’s aspirational, according to the NY Times. Obama’s assurances “may not be literally true or enforceable.”

Which leaves me in the uncomfortable position of supporting health care reform — I’m certain that the status quote is unsustainable; that it’s morally wrong to have nearly 50 million people with no health insurance, and to have insurance companies drop coverage when people need it most – without knowing for sure the best way to go about it.

It’s hard to get people to storm the barricades for something like the House bill, which, as the Times reports, sets detailed standards for ‘acceptable health care coverage,’ that would define ‘essential benefits’ and permissible co-payments.

Oy.

In my post the other day, I suggested — partly out of pique — that proponents of reform need to shout louder than the proud members of the mob.

On reflection, I think that would be unwise. But we do need to try and educate ourselves. At Obama’s New Hampshire town hall yesterday, one anti-Obama protestor quite literally showed up armed – legally — with a 9 mm pistol strapped to his leg. I suggest that the best thing proponents of reform can do, at this point, is to arm ourselves with knowledge — so we can contribute to this critical debate in constructive ways. 

The gun-toting protestor in New Hampshire also had a placard, “It is time to water the tree of liberty” – a reference to a Thomas Jefferson aphorism, that the tree of liberty needs to be watered with the blood of patriots.

Okay.

But Jefferson also famously said that he was “bold in the pursuit of knowledge, never fearing to follow truth and reason to whatever results they led.”

We might start here.

Louise Caire Clark, better known as just “Louise,” starred in the “Harry and Louise” ads that helped kill Bill Clinton’s health care reform in 1994.

Remember her?

Louise, it turns out, is going Robert McNamara on us. In an interview with Judith Warner of the NY Times, Louise says she “always wanted reform” and “felt bad it didn’t happen.” She’s actually a fan of socialized medicine, and had campaigned door-to-door for Clinton in 1992. In 1993, she was a single mother of two, trying to finish college, and living in fear of losing her health care insurance, when she showed up and read the script for the anti-health reform ad. She very nearly walked off the set.

“I was in a very bad mood,” she recalled. “I was going to make as much as it would cost to pay a baby sitter for the day. I got a script and said, ‘Whoa, Houston, we have a problem.’ I had to stop production to have the director explain to me who was funding it and what they were trying to do.”

The director was the political consultant Ben Goddard. He told Clark that the ads were being paid for by the Health Insurance Association of America. But, he said, the insurance lobby’s goal was merely to “open communications with the White House, to bring everyone in,” she recalls.

“He said, ‘It’s just one ad, and everybody knows there’s going to be health reform.”

She needed the money, apparently. So she played the part. And played it well. So well, in fact, that it killed her acting career — she became too widely recognized as the face of the anti-reform effort. (She did wind up marrying the director; every thorn has its rose, I guess.)

She’s in a new ad this time around, “Get the Job Done,” sponsored by a trade group representing drug makers and a nonprofit advocating affordable medical care.

In the new ad, Harry drops a newspaper in front of Louise, sitting at the kitchen table, and says: “Well, it looks like we may finally get health care reform.”

“It’s about time,” Louise answers. At the end, she concludes: “A little more cooperation, a little less politics, and we can get the job done this time.”

I think it would have been more effective, frankly, if, instead of having Harry and Louise act out a new tableau, the actors had done a confessional, explaining that they erred in doing the ads against reform 15 years ago, they regretted their role, and were now fighting for President Obama’s reform effort.

When I went to YouTube to watch the ad, though, it immediately became clear that it had gotten under the skin of one viewer, who wrote:

What the fuck do these two oldsters know about anything? When the fuck is this whole goddamned “Big Chill”? generation gonna fuck off and die??? Let two young people talk about how IT IS NOT UP TO THEIR NEIGHBORS TO PAY FOR THEIR HEALTH CARE!!! FUCK YOU, HARRY AND LOUISE!!!!! JUST SAY NO TO BIG GOVERNMENT!!!!!!

I don’t know who the poster was, but it’s safe to assume it was not Paul Krugman, the nobel prize winning economist, who began his column this morning:

It seems that we aren’t going to have a second Great Depression after all. What saved us? The answer, basically, is Big Government.

So why don’t we all just say no to people who put their heads in the sand, blinding themselves to reality.

Take it from Louise Caire Clark — it doesn’t end well.

The AP is reporting at this hour that the Senate has reached a deal to extend cash for clunkers. A vote is scheduled for Thursday to pump $2 billion more into the program, meaning consumers could get rebates on fuel efficient cars through Labor Day.

Following lengthy negotiations, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said Democrats and Republicans had agreed to vote on the plan Thursday, along with a series of potential changes to the bill, which was passed by the House last week. Reid has said Democrats have enough votes to approve the measure and reject any changes that would cause an interruption in the rebates of up to $4,500.

Apparently, this means the bill has enough Republican support to ward off a threatened filibuster.

[Republican] Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky concurred that the matter would be settled soon. And objectors conceded they do not have the votes to force all of the changes they want, or to block the House version of the bill.

This is terrific news, for all the reasons I blogged about yesterday. And this:

If the Senate approves the additional money, it’s likely to lead automakers to increase production and bring back laid-off workers. Many automakers reported low inventories due to increased sales from the program at the end of July. Already Hyundai Motor Co. has added a day of production to its Montgomery, Ala., plant, and Ford is considering increases.

It’s a great start to a critical month in which Democrats will be barnstorming the country, making the case for health care reform, asking Americans to trust their government.

POSTSCRIPT: On a 60-37 vote, the Senate approved $2 billion more for cash for clunkers today. The AP reports:

The legislation had its share of critics, though, most of them Republicans.

“What we’re doing is creating debt. … The bill to pay for those cars is going to come due on our children and grandchildren,” said Sen. Judd Gregg, R-N.H.

Really? This, from the same Judd Gregg who didn’t bat an eyelash over the past eight years as George Bush racked up 4 trillion dollars worth of debt? More debt than any president in U.S. history?

I think what we are doing is creating jobs, selling cars, helping the environment, and spurring consumer confidence — all of which could hasten the end of this recession and actually help lower the national debt, over the long term.

But, hey, that’s just me.

As I write this, the AP is reporting “Deal with ‘Blue Dogs’ sets up health care vote.”

The gist is that in the House, liberal Democrats and centrist Blue Dog Democrats are close to  a compromise agreement that would provide health insurance to millions, while slowing skyrocketing health costs. At the same time, Democrats and Republicans on the all-important Senate Finance Committee are nearing a bipartisan deal that would extend coverage to 95 percent of Americans without raising federal deficits.

“We’re on the edge, we’re almost there,” said Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa, the senior Republican involved in the secretive talks

This is great news, to a point. To reach consensus, Democrats are likely to drop a public insurance option, as well as a provision forcing businesses to offer insurance to their workers — both key components of the Obama plan.

Still, if lawmakers could reach a agreement before the House recess begins Friday – regardless of the shape and scope of the bill — it would be a huge lift for Obama, considering that just days ago, health care seemed DOA.

Now, the bad news. Obama’s poll numbers are slipping, along with his political muscle. A new NY Times poll finds that Obama is losing his clout on health care, just as people’s concerns ratchet up.

Obama’s ability to shape the debate on health care appears to be eroding as opponents aggressively portray his overhaul plan as a government takeover that could limit Americans’ ability to choose their doctors and course of treatment. …

Reflecting a problem that has hindered efforts to bring major changes to health care for decades, Americans expressed considerable unease about what the end result would mean for them individually.

Republicans no doubt sense blood in the water.

“Although some members of a coalition of conservative Democrats announced a breakthrough in negotiations Wednesday,” FoxNews.com reports, ”a final deal on the legislation could be a long way off, meaning August could stand as a key month before the potentially dramatic finale in the fall.”

The House will wait until September to bring the bill to the floor — so that members can spend August combing through the massive bill and listening to the concerns of their constituents. 

The month of August now takes on out-sized importance.

Remember, just a few days ago, South Carolina Republican Sen. Jim De Mint declared: “If we’re able to stop Obama on this, it will be his Waterloo. It will break him.”

We are going to see and hear a steady drumbeat of negativity from Republicans, many of whom, like De Mint, are determined to kibosh health care not on the merits, but as a way to undermine Obama on his signature issue, thereby pulling the rug out from under the new administration.

Which is why anybody who cares about Obama’s broader progressive agenda — from passing a cap and trade bill that would stem global warming, to closing Guantanamo Bay and restoring America’s image in the world, to actively working to broker peace between Israel and the Palestinians — needs to take action in the next four weeks to support health care.

Call or write your congressmen. Liberal or conservative, they need to hear from constituents who want a bill.  If you don’t know who your congressman is, check out www.healthcareforamericanow.com.  It’s a terrific grassroots organization, supported by Obama, that can help you call your congressman, download print materials to hand out to neighbors and friends, or find a local group to volunteer with. If you’d rather make a small donation, or buy a Health Care For America Now! shirt, you can do that, too.

Write a letter to the editor of your local paper, demanding health care reform. If you do nothing else this August, forward this post to a friend, or send out your own email.

It’s four weeks that will shape the next four years.

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.

1. 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.”
2. 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.”
3. 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?)
4. 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.

I was starting to get depressed.

It seems that everyone I speak to in the Jewish community is worried. Obama is pressuring Israel, but not the Palestinians, they say. He’s naïve about Iran. And why did he go to Cairo and say that Israel’s founding was rooted in the tragic history of the Holocaust?

These, by the way, are the folks who voted for him in the last election.

I had breakfast in the Senate dining room this morning. After, in an ornate hallway, I picked up copies of three of the best newspapers covering DC politics.

The Hill newspaper had this four column lead: “Dems reel on healthcare.”

Congressional Democrats and the White House are scrambling to regain their footing after a series of setbacks has stalled political momentum to reform the nation’s healthcare system … The Democratic roll-out on health care has encountered significant bumps in the road.

Roll Call blared: “Health Care Bipartisanship Fades.”

As Senate health care negotiations enter the final phase at the committee level, Democrats are emphasizing their own policy preferences and conceding the unlikelihood of attracting significant Republican support for the legislation.

 
Obama’s top domestic priority, down the chutes, before anyone’s even seen a bill.

But, wait. There’s more.

Politico decreed: “Obama Draws Rural Dem Ire.”

Angered by White House decisions on everything from greenhouse gases to car dealerships, congressional Democrats from rural districts are threatening to revolt against parts of President Barack Obama’s ambitious first-year agenda.

The gay community is angry at him. Pesticide manufacturers are upset about the organic garden on the White House lawn. Doctors booed him this week for refusing to cap malpractice law suits. On Israel, my best friend’s mother feels personally betrayed.

And then I did something that everyone inside the Beltway, and everyone active in the Jewish subset of that world, should do – at least once.

On the way from the Capitol to my hotel, I stopped off at the Newseum on Pennsylvania Ave. I didn’t go inside. I just perused the exhibit they have along the sidewalk: morning front pages from around the country and the world. More than 50 in all, posted, neatly, in handsome window boxes.

Are you sitting? Brace yourself.

Exactly three front pages had stories on health care. One of those was the USA Today, and the other two — The Alabama Gadsen Times and the Mississippi Hattiesburg American – actually ran an AP article with favorable headlines, about how the Dems were trimming the cost of the health care bill.

The Wyoming Star Tribune had a story about health care, too – Medicaid, focusing on cuts in the Wyoming department of health.

Only nine of fifty newspapers had front page articles about the uprising in Iran – and that includes the NY Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal. The Anchorage Daily news had the story, but it gave more prominence to a story about Gov. Palin’s pick for attorney general.

The Kentucky Enquirer did run a piece about concerns over nuclear power – but not in Tehran.  A new facility is planned for Piketon, Ohio.

In Montana, the Billings Gazette gave huge play to an animal cruelty case. The Morgantown, West Virginia Dominion Post had unsettling pictures of emergency workers trying to extricate a teenager from his overturned car. The news in Kenosha, Wisconsin, was about a bus that nearly tumbled down a city staircase. The Home News Tribune – my former hometown paper in Central Jersey – trumpeted: “Jeweler’s Death Still a Mystery.”

The stories about Iraq had a local angle. (The Telegraph, in Nashua, N.H., gave prominent play to a 23-year-old Salem High grad killed in Iraq over the weekend.) The scandals had a local flavor. (The Detroit News had a story about Conyers – not Michigan Congressman John – but city councilwoman Monica, facing bribery charges.) “’Magical Season’ ends for Cinderella Team” had nothing to do with the Magic of Orlando, and everything to do with the Southern Mississippi Golden Eagles, whose baseball team lost in the College World Series.

There were front page stories about swine flu and fires, gas leaks and calorie counting, floods, misbehaving teachers, and great hamburgers.

Sure, you could sit down and google all of these local papers, and view them one at a time. But walking along the row of windows, looking at one after another, had a downright cathartic effect, all its own. It was as if, all at once, the inside-the-Beltway-Jewish-world bubble I’m living in burst, and a burden lifted. Not a single story about how President Obama is dragging the country over a cliff while simultaneously destroying the special relationship between the United States and Israel!

Here’s the thing: Obama knows what’s on the front pages of all those newspapers. He has a long view. He knows that even people who disagree with him are giving him a lot of leeway right now. (The Times has his approval rating at 63 percent today.)

He understands that most people – including most Jews – aren’t paying that close attention to Israel at this point; they are not parsing every word of his Cairo speech or waiting to hear Bibi Netanyahu’s response. They are, first and foremost, worried about their jobs and their health and their communities; they want their kids to come home safe from prom.

Yet at the same time, Obama knows Israel is critically important, not only to the United States, but to a broad swath of American Jews. That’s why he goes so far to affirm and reaffirm the special relationship between the U.S. and Israel; he knows full well that the Jewish claim to Israel is first and foremost about the land; he has filled his White House with pro-Israel Jews who send their kids to Jewish day school, like Dan Shapiro and Rahm Emanuel. Dennis Ross, the Middle East negotiator and staunch friend of Israel, just moved from the State Department to the White House, where he will have the president’s ear.

Obama is pressing a peace process that most Jews support, because he believes it is ultimately in Israel’s best interest, the only way for the Jewish state to achieve true security. My sense is that by and large, Jews — from Nashua to Hattiesburg to Kenosha — understand this, and hope fervently that he succeeds.