It's not so amazing to me how soon Obama's most enthusiastic supporters have soured on him, but rather how suddenly. It seems like it happened all at once, about two or three weeks ago (or at least that's how it appeared in the media, and as the man said, "I only know what I read in the newspapers"). This is largely b/c of the difficulty he's having with health care reform.
That's unfortunate, b/c O. is doing about as much to advance public health care as anybody since Truman (remember him? he didn't win reelection - but that was because of an unpopular war).
If you want to know why significant health care reform is not going to clear the Senate, look here, here, and here. Note especially the shift in percentages between the last election cycle and this one. Nothing succeeds like success, esp. when it comes to political fundraising.
It's useful to compare this round with that of 1993. In that year, Clinton and Gore pulled out all the stops to get NAFTA passed - promising anything - new air force bases to freshman representatives - to get it through. C & G did an LBJ number on the Congress, and, despite the majority of Americans' opposition to NAFTA, got it through. Just barely. But that's all it takes, in our System. And passing NAFTA and GATT was what Clinton was hired to do.
Then came health care, and Gentleman Bill in effect said, "You handle it, Honey."
Sorry - I've worked in politics too much to be idealistic about "The Process" (as pols unironically term it), but not enough to be cynical enough to pretend it works for anyone who's not at the top.
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3 comments:
Let's not forget that Obama's in an "unpopular war," too—one getting worse by the day. He's contemplating committing as many as 38,000 more troops to it. Everyone wonders: To what end? I have to say that it's not like he didn't call Afghanistan "the right war" in his campaign, so this shouldn't be a surprise. But that war on top of a failure to reform our unequal heath care system (a shift in the daily lives of Americans that I think is in no way comparable to NAFTA and GATT), and rampant coddling of greedy bankers, and genuflections before the same old lobbyists, he may well be looking at a single term. I worked for Obama, and I admire him; my disgust is less with him than with the Democrats at large, who once again are proving themselves gutless, bought-off hypocrites who talk big and do very little. In this they resemble no one so much as—Republicans.
I've not soured on O himself, but more than suspect the system is broken from bottom to top. Krugman had a good piece on this recently. Let's see what happens with health care. I'm opposed to the Afghan adventure but, like so many things, it was handed to us on a platter by Mr. Bush.
yeah, I kind of felt sorry for all the people who thought Barry O. was going to end the wars. "read more history" I thought.
I actually think the health care crisis is non unrelated to the processes that NAFTA, GATT, WTO, etc., are part of. The more dangerous parts of those "agreements" are legal points that put most people to sleep. It's an awfully good legal-political club for corpos to beat everyone else over the head with. Luckily the US & G-8 aren't abiding by them, so the third world govt's are resisting.
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