Obama--No Change, No Fight, No Wins

As has always been true in Congress, what you can’t kill with votes, you can kill with procedure. Today a Republican Senator demanded that a 700 page amendment to the proposed health care bill be read aloud. The amendment would have re-introduced a government run health care benefit as an alternative to private insurance.
After the voice-weary clerks had read for three hours, the Democratic senator who had introduced the amendment withdrew it. So it goes with health care. Obama vowed to tax “Cadillac Health Care Plans” that allow for lower co-pays and better benefits. When Congress realizes this tax on people with decent benefits can raise billions—it is likely that anyone with decent benefits will be taxed.
So much for no new taxes on the middle class—remember Obama’s promise last year? It just seems to me that Obama fights for very little that he promises. If a senator yells loud enough, the President seems very willing to water down or withdraw anything that offends.
Presidents certainly have always had to compromise with Congress. The most effective have never gotten everything they wanted. But Obama doesn’t seem to care to fight for anything. Let’s look what Presidents who fought have actually gotten.
Reagan rammed through startling tax cuts in the face of a hostile House of Representatives. George W. Bush did the same thing with a very slender Congressional margin. LBJ brought the minority Republicans along with him as he passed unprecedented Civil Rights bills, on top of Medicaid, Medicare, Great Society legislation and a huge anti-poverty program, while funding a major war.
George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton both got tax raises through Congress—at great cost to themselves politically—but they got the raises. Fight for something, especially in the first two years of your presidency and you’re liable to get at least some of it.
If you don’t fight and win at least something in those first two years, you aren’t likely to do any better—or anywhere near as well—in the next two or six! So far Obama hasn’t gotten much of anything through Congress that George W. Bush wouldn’t agree with.
More troops in Afghanistan and a slow, oh so slow, drawdown in Iraq. Then a TARP plan that Bush began that rescues banks and large corporations, while people get evicted. So much for “change”. (Maybe we misunderstood him—he was talking about SMALL change?)
Oh, and Congress has approved another term for Bush’s choice of Chairman of the Federal Reserve. And notice that Bernanke not only got another shot at the Fed, he made “Time Magazine’s” Man of The Year for 2009. All Obama got was the Peace Prize.
But if Obama is doing NOTHING to move health care forward, the Republicans have become masters of hypocrisy. This week’s “Newsweek” (Dec. 21, p.30) points out that Republicans rammed through their Medicare prescription drug plan six years ago that looks a lot like the bill before Congress now.
It created an expensive entitlement for a limited number of people—Medicare help for drugs for folks my age and up. The Republicans threatened to fire Medicare’s chief actuary if he dared even hint to Congress what the drug plan would really cost.
As “Newsweek” columnist, Jacob Weisberg writes, “Simply stated, [the drug plan] is complicated as hell, costs a fortune, still isn’t paid for, and doesn’t do all that much… .” He insists that the cost of the Republican drug plan “dwarfs the … cost of the [current, Democratic] senate bill.”
He suggests that your attitude on health care depends entirely on the political party that is currently proposing it. There’s certainly nothing new about that. So what has Obama to lose if he rolls up his sleeves and fights? Right now he’s just letting them get away with it.
Or isn’t that the way things are done by someone who cut his teeth in the Chicago machine. Take a page out of Truman’s book. He was raised in the Pendergast machine. But, boy, did he know how to fight. And sometime’s win.