Obama: I Don't Feel Your Pain
Most people not unlucky enough to be film or TV critics believe that the main "product" of studios and networks are their movies and shows. In reality, they're just the means to an end. The "products" isn’t the films or the series -- it's the amount of eyeballs that they bring in. That's what the theatre chains that buy the movies, the ad agencies that buy commercials, and the cable companies that charge their subscribers are paying for.
Amidst all the posing pomp and self-conscious symbolatry of the Healthcare Summit, in today's Washington, the dominant view seems to no longer be that the Congress is a group of individual members meant to stand in for and represent their constituents and their interests. Instead, the US Congress is now in danger of being reduced merely to twin armies of foot-soldiers in a politically theatrical, made-for-TV war between the forces of Barack "Yes We Can" Obama on one side, and the Rush-Ann-Sarah-Glenn mafia on the other.
Even Chris Matthews, who believes that passing the bill -- no matter what bill, no matter how bad, no matter what it does -- is the only "way out of this trap", was shocked by Obama's payback for "You lie!" and Samuel Alito's mouth that roared. Calling senior Congressmen by their first names, pointedly reading his notes during testimony by Senators like John McCain, and openly making fun of Eric Cantor and John Barrasso.... This seems all the more disconcerting to both conservatives and liberals alike when contrasted with Obama's passive leadership on health care six months or a year ago. He hoped in vain that if he remained on the sidelines, the Tea Party and "birther" radicals would go so far with their overheated rhetoric that they would hang themselves, and leave him with a free hand.
In my next piece, I'll be talking further about how Obama seems to be following all too well the playbook that Newsweek laid out for him the week of his inaugural -- to undo the right-wing reaction of the Cheney era by.... following Dick Cheney's recipe for the high-handed, elite, imperial executive to the letter.
Meanwhile, the American people have spoken -- some might say that, after Scott Brown's election, they've almost screamed, "We want JOBS." But instead, the Obama White House has made it clear that they aren't going to budge their massively unpopular health care program from the No. 1 priority slot, until they've budged it past the finish line.
Instead of accountability, the Obama White House's strategy is to encourage members of Congress to exult in their brute power to force unpopular, divisive legislation down the helpless public's throat.
The most egregious abuse of language is the plan to "extend coverage" to 30 million uninsured. The means of doing this is, of course, an "individual mandate" that makes a criminal of anyone too middle-class to afford health insurance to begin with. President Obama is quite right when he says that people who work for a small business or are self-employed "can't get health care". Yet the Senate's beau ideal requires that families and the self-employed making in the $60-80,000 range before taxes to spend 10 to 15% of their income to "greedy" health insurers before they receive a subsidy -- with NO tax credit for the difference.
One thing is clear -- for better or worse, the current debate on health care reform has passed the point of no return. This no longer has anything to do with such proletarian concerns as "what's good for the American people" -- and everything to do with a battle over whether Obama will be able to unfurl the flags and marching-band cues, the quill inkwell pen, and a beaming Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and Joe Biden over his shoulder, ready to charge into the next New Frontier -- or whether Glenn and Rush will have "We WON!" flashing on the chyron on their next TV show. The American people -- and their wallets -- are in danger of becoming merely the collateral damage.