After the Future

Heathcare Reform Debate Today

Just listened to Grassley and his argument on C-Span against Rockefeller's public option amendment to the Finance Committee bill.  It's hard to believe that this guy was ever taken seriously.  He comes across as a senile ideologue. Perhaps in that his electoral charm lies. Any Iowans want to help me understand that better? Hatch, at least, is semi-coherent in his concerns about the costs and his fears that the public option will be a Trojan horse leading to single payer. He's probably right about the second part.  But single payer, if it ever comes to that in this country, will never be the only option.  It will be like public universities and private universities.  There will be niches not effectively covered by the public plan that private insurers can fill.  Private universities, it should be pointed out are non-profits.  Private sector does not necessarily mean profit driven. And private universities are not driven out of business by public. But any for-profit insurance company should be driven out of business if it can't compete with non-profits on cost, quality, and access.

The main goal, for me at least, for healthcare reform is to remove the bulk--let's say 80% of insurance out of the the for-profit sphere.  It's ridiculous that shareholders should be the primary constituents of the insurance companies and not their customers. So if public or private doesn't matter as much to me as non-profit/profit.  If a non-profit, private insurance system could be set up, I'd be fine with it.  Most hospitals in the U.S. are community non-profits. It's possible, but it's not likely, so the government has to take the lead. The subsidiarist principle here is that the government should step in to server the public interest when the private sector won't meet those needs.  It's not that hard to understand.

As I write this, Menendez of NJ makes an important point that seems to get lost, which is that the public option is not an entitlement like Medicare, it's "a self-sustaining, independent, self-financing entity" and that's different, and it makes a big difference because it's simply attempting to be what I described in the previous paragraph--a non-profit insurance provider. It will pay for itself. The entitlement part is in the subsidies, and there's little controversy about that.

In any event, the debate doesn't really matter. It's not as if anybody's mind is going to be changed by it. What matters more is the politics, and the politics are all about how the conservadems see themselves positioned on the issue. They thought they had cover in bi-partisanship, but now that there's no pretense regarding bi-partisanship, the effort to make them appear tools of the insurance industry seems to be working.  It's hard to tell whether the ads being run against the conservadems in their home states are working, but it's the kind of thing that has to happen.

So this vote in Finance will be an interesting bellwether.  More as the day progresses, if there's anything worth saying.

P.S. Howard Dean was interesting on Countdown last night.  When O'Donnell asked him whether he would recommend voting for a bill if it didn't have a public option in it, he said, he recommend taking all the money out of it, and just voting on the insurance reforms. It's not all or nothing, but the main goal is to prevent this bill from being a Medicare Part D type giveaway to the insurance companies. He veiled scorn for the conservadems who are voting the insurance company line was refreshing from somebody who doesn't think keeping Democratic incumbents in power is the sole purpose of the DNC.

Here's the U-Tube.  It's worth watching if you haven't seen it.  Dean comes in at the 3:30 mark:

Glenn Beck's Day

After receiving the key, Beck spoke for about an hour, reminiscing about growing up in Mount Vernon, which he described as a "magical place," connected to the values of small-town America.

"I believe in Norman Rockwell's America," he said. . . .

Beck said he didn't remember politics being divisive growing up, and that if people now could just stop "tearing each other apart" there was a bright future for the country. 

(The Seattle Times in a story about Beck's being given the key to the city in Mount Vernon, the town where he grew up  about sixty miles north of Seattle.)

Probably enough has been written about Glenn Beck to make unnecessary anything more I have to say about him.  And I don't know that I have anything to add to the subject that I have not already written on my many posts about "Zombie Traditionalism" and "Lot's Wife Syndrome", but I just find the right-wing mentality oddly fascinating. 

It's not enough to simply dismiss it as irrational, because all the important things that give life meaning are irrational. The trick is to discern whether they are sub-rational (instinct driven, fear and greed) or super-rational (grace-inspired--compassion, understanding, idealism) and then to respond appropriately.  My "hypothesis" is that the irrationality of the right wing is sub-rational while presenting itself as super-rational, and that's always when trouble starts: It's the archetypal problem of the devil quoting scripture.L

I've written before about the main difference between the Left and the Right lying in its orientation toward time--the Right oriented toward the past; the Left toward the future.  It's suggested in the names we give each, conservative and progressive. I've also written about how all premodern societies are predominantly past oriented, and modern societies are predominantly future oriented. And I've argued that modernity came to the west because of the unique Jewish-Christian validation given to history as meaningful, as the stage upon which a cosmic, future-oriented, promise-centered salvation drama is played out. The essence of the Judeo-Christian orientation toward history is Abrahamic, on the move, trusting in the promise of an impossible future, rather than clinging to the securities of the past. Progressivism as it emerged in the 19th Century depends for its inspiration on Hegelian and Marxist eschatology which in turn would be impossible without the Jewish-Christian mythos in the background.  

Now We're Getting Serious

I was wondering what was taking so long for this kind of approach to be tried:

Protect Insurance Companies PSA from Will Ferrell

What's been lacking is imagination and creative thinking in promoting most Progressive initiatives. Where's the Uncle Tom's Cabin for healthcare reform?

Divided and Conquered

Frank Rich's column on Sunday, and Glenn Greenwald's post today about the wildly incoherent Glenn Beck are clarifying regarding the middle ground between left and right in this country.  After quoting Rich's column pointing out that Beck's view that "Wall Street owns our government," and that "Our government and these gigantic corporations have merged" is indistinguishable from what Matt Taibbi might write in Rolling Stone. Greenwald asks whether such views are liberal or conservative, and anwers: 

They're neither.  Instead, they're the by-product of a completely different dichotomy that is growing in importance:  between system insiders and their admirers (those who believe our national political establishment and its elites are basically sound and good) and system outsiders (those whose anger is confined not to one of the two political parties but who instead believe that the political culture itself is fundamentally corrupted and destructive).  There are people typically identified as members of either the conventional Right or Left who are, in fact, more accurately described as being in this latter group: those disenchanted with the political culture itself.  Anger over the Wall Street bailout and corporate excesses was one example where that trans-partisan disenchantment was evident.  The railing by Beck quoted in Rich's paragraph reflects the same thing.  And that trans-partisan rage is clearly playing an important role in driving these protest movements.

So why has the Republican Party become so identified with this protest against the establishment?  Greenwald answers:

Currently, opposition to "the government" is easily translated into "opposition to Democrats," and these protests are thus exploited and distorted as partisan Republican tools even though many of the individual protesters are as anti-GOP as they are anti-Democrat.  Add to that the Democratic Party's general distaste for citizen activism (especially street protests) as well as its servitude to Wall Street and corporate interests, and Democrats are straitjacketed into ceding this protest movement to GOP operatives, who are cynically exploiting it to promote goals that have nothing to do with -- are even at odds with -- the goals of many of the protesters themselves.

This points to the great paradox of our political life that I've written so frequently about here--how cultural/tribal identification prevents effective political action.  Entrenched elite power--the system insiders--remains secure so long as cultural lefties and cultural righties feel such a deep aversion for one another that they could never unite around a economic and power distributions causes from which they would mutually benefit. It's the same strategy southern oligarchs used to divide poor whites from poor blacks. As long as at least one cultural group loathes the other, they are divided, distracted, and therefore conquered, and the system elites have nothing to worry about.

Blue Dog Exposure (Updated)

Yesterday I  wrote that if in fact the tide has shifted, as I think it has, toward more robust healthcare reform being possible, then Blue Dogs will have an increasingly harder time defending their opposition to a good bill that serves the public interest. Blue Dogs are not moderates, if by moderate we mean having a flexible, reasonable approach to solving political conflicts to get something done in the public interest. They are corporatist careerists who care more about their special interest constituencies than they do about the real needs of the Dems in the districts and states they serve. They use bi-partisanship as a cover for serving corporate interests.

I just came across this post by Digby that expands on the point:

If these Democrats had a brain in their heads they'd realize that the best way to maintain their power (and keep getting those big bucks) is to pass a good bill. Successful reform will be their only defense because the true political downside to passing a bad bill now is being out there alone selling out the American people all by themselves.

It's quite clear these corporatists [Democrats] really don't want to pass a good bill --- they are, after all, more loyal to big business than the Republicans at this point, who see that there is great political hay to be made in taking the populist side (at least until they get back into power.) But in the end the Republicans may just force them to pass something decent anyway by failing to give them the cover for capitulation they so desperately need. It's an interesting squeeze play that may backfire on the GOP in the long run if good health care reform is passed. (Let's hope so anyway.)

Bi-partisanship, in other words, is a requirement for getting a bad, i.e., a corporate giveaway, bill.  If the Republicans would kowtow more to the interests of the insurance industry than to their irrational base and their DeMintist ambitions to destroy Obama's presidency, a corporatist bill would be much easier to pass. Blue Dogs who support a bad bill can be isolated now, because they can't use  bi-partisan b.s. as a cover. They will be forced to move toward supporting, no matter how grudgingly, more progressive, robust reform.

Fighting for Healthcare Reform IV (Updated)

I'm feeling better about what's happening on the healthcare reform front, and I'm trying to determine if there is any basis in reality for such a shift. On what data do I base such a shift in feeling?  And do those data have any relationship with what's really going on? I don't know for sure, but here's my take on the causes for my change in feeling:

One data point is the Baucus Bill's imminent release and markup. It's every bit as bad as we were led to believe it would be. Even the Olympia Snowe "trigger" isn't going to be in it. So why should that be a cause for optimism?  Because my sense is that it's now widely perceived as a joke, whereas earlier it was seen as the only bill to be taken seriously, that it was, in fact, the Obama/Emmanuel bill. Maybe it was at one point, and maybe it still is, but it would surprise me if this bill represents the substance of what we'll finally get. My sense is that Obama has distanced himself from it in the last week or so. Maybe we'll be hearing more now about the HELP version of this bill.

Another part of the data that has changed is that earlier you didn't hear much in the way of insider defense of the public option. The conventional wisdom a few weeks ago was that it was dead. There were a few lonely voices in Congress that spoke in support of it, but a shift occurred when several members of the progressive caucus drew a line in the sand and said they wouldn't vote for a bill without it. The early signals in response to that threat coming out of the White House were along the lines of: "It's an empty threat. What are the progressives going to do--vote No on a bill that solves problems a, b, and c, but not d?  Are they willing to lose three improvements because they can't get a fourth? They can't do that, because they can't be associated with another failure to reform healthcare. They'll have to support whatever comes out, public option or no." 

Zombie Conservatism

Sullivan and Dreher are catching on, so to speak, to my trope about "Zombie Traditionalism".  For a more in-depth look, check my 2005 posts on this theme here, here, and here. See also "Dying Traditions."

Does the GOP Have a Future?

The country needs a serious right-of-center party - one that has real ideas, one that can engage in a serious debate with the Democrats, one that has a sense of a larger national purpose beyond winning the next election, and one that can actually attract more Americans to its banner because it has earned their trust, not because it knows how to polarize.

Maybe Democrats should be happy that Republicans have been reduced to a lunatic fringe. But the lunatics still have their seat at the table, and someday they may be sitting at its head again. What then? (Source)

2010 will be an interesting test of the future viability of the GOP. The party not in the White House usually gains seats in the midterms, but it's important that the GOP not gain seats in 2010. If the GOP continues to lose seats, it should force the grownups in the Party to reassert themselves. But exactly who are those grownups? Pawlenty, Grassley, Coburn, Graham, Jindal, Romney, McCain, and Hatch?  Considering their recent behavior, it's questionable whether even they can be considered grownups, but even if they are, do they have the clout to take the party back to a reasonable center right? I don't know. Apparently they don't think they do now; otherwise they'd act more like grownup and not cave to the extremists. But that could change after serious losses in 2010.

If the GOP loses more seats in 2010, it should send a signal to the Dems, one would hope, that Conservadems, like Konrad and Baucus, define the center right, not Republicans, and so the real center is further left. That's the kind of realignment that would more accurately represent the country's electorate and give us some hope of a return to sanity. One would hope.

The frightening prospect is that the GOP will actually regain some seats. It would seem unlikely. If only around 25% of Americans self-identify as Republicans now, centrist independents turned off by GOP extremism should swing more to the Dems except in the neo-Confederate districts in the South and in some other very red districts in the mountain west and rural north. One would think.

But I've learned never to underestimate the power of motivated, organized, and well-funded minorities, no matter how fringe they might seem in their mentality. As I wrote last week, this rightwing fringe differs from the left wing fringe of the seventies in that it has major media megaphones, it has the financial backing of the Corporate right, and it has clever people who know how to organize angry, frightened people to make a much larger impact than their numbers would warrant. The power and influence of the far right in this country should never be underestimated.

We'll learn a lot in 2010. The survival of the GOP as a legitimate, serious party depends on its being humiliated again in 2010. The important thing that both GOP leaders and the MSM  must learn is that the kind of extremism that has become mainstream GOP thinking is the road to political oblivion. That if the party continues to allow Limbaugh, Beck, Hannity, and Coulter to dictate its agenda, it no longer has any legitimacy and cannot be taken seriously.

Obama's Healthcare Speech

Nice speech, although it should have been given months ago, but let's see how he follows up. I liked his tone of determination, let's see if he actually gets it done. It's clear he gets it, but he's said the right things before and backed away from them. He has developed a credibility problem for himself that I hope he'll now prove, at least on this issue, that he doesn't deserve.

But while the speech might have reassured the general public, do we think it changed any minds in the Senate?  If this issue was up to the House and the general public, there would be nothing to worry about. There are a handful of senators that hold the future of healthcare in their hands, and pressuring them to do what the American people rather than the health insurance industry wants is all that matters. Will Obama and his hitman Emmanuel get down and dirty and twist the arms to which those hands are attached? Does he want to?

A couple of other points:

Obama's appeal to the American character--Isn't that precisely what the culture war is about, and therefore about which there is no real consensus? On the cultural right, Obama is perceived as having little or no participation in the American character--he's really a Kenyan/Indonesian Muslim, after all. Is the American character tolerant, compassionate, fair-minded, and neighborly?  Or does it collectively compose a nasty culture of Joe Wilsons, rugged individuals for who live in an "it's us against them" mentality, when "them" is everybody who who does not conform to their idea of normal?  "We normal Americans aren't going to pay the health care costs of those Others." Isn't that really Joe Wison's point. Do you think he really cares about whether Hisapanics who might be helped are legal or not? 

Lincoln gave a famous speech similarly appealing to the better angels of our nature, and then we Americans went out and slaughtered one another for the next four years.

Individual mandates--I understand the logic of requiring them, but the question is how it will work out in practice.  Will poorer people be forced to buy low-quality insurance with super high deductibles and huge copays which might help with a catastrophic illness or injury, but not help with the more routine bone breaks, checkups, childbirths? It's interesting that the individual-mandates issue was a bone of contention in the primaries because Obama didn't insist on them while Clinton did, and people criticized Obama for not really being behind "universal" care. People should not be forced to buy an insurance policy that won't significantly help them pay their routine healthcare costs.

The public option--He says he's for it, but will he fight for it? I hope he will, but I'm skeptical. I'm open to the idea that there are other ways to achieve the desperately needed cost savings and controls beside providing a public option, but until something that is proposed that is simpler and cleaner, the public option should be fought for. 

Private/Public is not the real issue; it's profit/non-profit. My fundamental beef is with the idea that the bulk of health care should be delivered and paid for in the for-profit sector. That bulk should instead be provided by non-profits, whether they are situated in the public or private sectors. Their main concern should be with serving people's health needs, not in delivering profits to investors. Only about 18% of hospitals in the U.S. are set up as private for-profit corporations; the rest are community non-profits or public hospitals. Why should healthcare financing be any different?

Obama's drawing the analogy of health care delivery to the public/private delivery of education is apt. I'm ok with people buying insurance from for-profit companies if they can give them what the non-profits don't, but it shouldn't be more than a fifth of the total market. The bulk of good quality, affordable healthcare should be delivered in the same way that the bulk of good-quality, affordable education is. How many private schools and universities are set up as for-profit corporations?  Private/Public doesn't matter to me; it's profit/non-profit that's the real heart of the issue.

Quote of the Day: Michael Lind

On who really creates wealth:

the true creator of wealth is, ultimately, the commonwealth – not only the political community, but the civilization that it shares with other nations. No technical invention or business innovation is a creation of something from nothing. All depend on the intellectual capital that the human race has accumulated since the Paleolithic period. The argument for property rights then becomes a utilitarian one – which set of property rights will spur individuals and groups and whole societies to engage in useful innovation? (Not all innovation is necessarily useful, as we have seen in the case of financial innovation.)

The commonwealth theory defines wealth broadly, as everything that conduces to the well-being of a community. Material production is only one of many activities that enrich a society. Public goods like safety and utilities and infrastructure and parks are part of the wealth that we share in common. So are many private goods that sometimes are best provided by the public, like public education and inexpensive healthcare.

By all means, then, let us celebrate virtuous capital owners and visionary investors as "wealth creators" on Labor Day. And let us celebrate as well as the other creators of private wealth, on the assembly line and in the office cubicle and in the janitorial closet, and the creators of public wealth in the form of roads and subways and parks, and the police officers and soldiers without whom a high level of public and private wealth could neither be created nor preserved. There are criminals and parasites among all classes of society, but most of us are wealth creators, and we deserve to be recognized as such. (Source)

Seems obvious to me. But in America, is there any idea harder to sell?

For the success culture of the American economic right, whose constituents in most cases vastly overestimate their own individual contributions to their own wealth and success, there is either independence or dependence.  It's a false dichotomy--inter-dependence is also a possibility--in fact, it's the only healthful possibility.

Self-reliance--yes.  We have to stand on our own two feet. Our dignity as humans depends on it. But self-reliance cannot be understood as healthful unless situated in an inter-dependent context. Inter-dependence means that we are all responsible,free agents as individuals, but that also we are all in this business of making a life together. We need one another, and cooperation is as important a value as competition in producing prosperity. 

And some times we're in a position to help, and sometimes we're in a position in which we need help, and it shouldn't be extraordinary to give it or shameful to ask for it.

About Those Mandates

. . . a lot of politicians seem to think if everyone buys insurance, the problem will be solved, but that doesn't get to the heart of the issue: That private insurance is an adversarial system designed to limit the amount of care you get and maximize the amount of money that can be extracted from its customers. (Source)

As someone somewhere pointed out, it's wrong to frame this as health insurance reform; it should be thought of as healthcare financing reform. I buy homeowner's insurance because there's a risk my house might burn down, and I need to hedge against the catastrophic financial loss that would cause.

But while there's a good chance my house will never burn down, there's no such chance that I or my family will not need healthcare. The idea that getting ill is on the same level as having one's house burn down or getting into a car accident is confounding. There's no might or might not when it comes to healthcare. 

The question is what's the best model for paying for it, and the insurance market model has proved itself to be egregiously inadequate. Inadequate, at least, for the people in need of healthcare, not for those who currently make a living by insuring it.

Presidential Insouciance

From the outset of the 2008 campaign, the rationale for his long-shot candidacy was that he stood firmly for a set of principles in policy and governance and against political business as usual, as well as a style of politics that emphasized citizen activism. He would drive the corporate lobbyists away from Capitol Hill, the White House and the federal agencies. He would insist on transparency and integrity in conducting the people’s business. Above all, he would pursue the public interest forthrightly rather than inch forward triangularly and incrementally.

Perhaps none of these happy promises was likely to be fulfilled, and perhaps that was something Obama and his campaign aides always understood. But as the new White House came to terms with the realities of Washington, they seem to have thrown off their original images and ideals insouciantly -- as if unburdening themselves of unfashionable baggage that embarrassed them in the big city.

Nowhere has this fundamental mistake been more visible than in the effort to reform healthcare. (Joe Conason)

"Insouciant" is the right word that captures, for me anyway, what's so galling about the presidential performance so far. There isn't even the pretense that those values and principles that he campaigned on play a role in his decsionmaking.  Supporters like me hoped against hope that we were not being played, but it was not a good sign when he reversed himself on the FISA issue before the election--but his casual disregard for the principles he said he stood for is pretty astonishing.

I don't know which is worse: that he is an empty suit for whom everything he said was just substanceless electioneering or that once in office he has had no other choice but to back away from his principles because the presidency is an impotent shell occupied by a telegenic marionette whose strings are pulled by others. 

There might be other, more generous explanations, but Obama is vulnerable to be branded with either of these unless he finds a way to vigorously present himself to the base in a more compelling way. Whatever the reality might be behind the scenes, the public presentation has been pathetically and typically true to the Democrats' stereotype as morally rudderless weaklings for whom political expediency is the only motivator. We've seen from Obama what we would have expected from Kerry had he been elected.

It would have been interesting if Obama was as passionate about his principles and willing to fight for them and to communicate them as Reagan was for his. It might have been interesting to see a galvanized base rally to his support.  But all we've got left now from the excitement he's generated is like a limp, sagging balloon.

History has a way of turning a corner unexpectedly, and so there's no predicting what things will look like from the perspective of 2012.  Presidents often recover from weak starts.  But 'disappointing' understates what we've seen so far.  It's just been the same old, same old.

It's clear now, if there was ever any real doubt, that if there's to be real change, Americans who want a politics in the public interest have to develop a machinery to effect policy in the majority's interests in the same way that movement conservatism has developed the machinery to effect policy in their minority's interests. Elected Republicans follow the lead of movement leaders.  Beck and Limbaugh have more power than McCain or McConnell.

Whither America?

It's always important for us to remember what the last eight years have again taught us, which is that America has a very strong civic fabric, one that can withstand, absorb and conquer all manner of ugly behavior. It can take in stride a lot of angry rhetoric, townhall fisticuffs and more.

But as this escalates we should continually be stepping back and thinking retrospectively from the vantage point of the future about where this all seems to be heading.  Josh Marshall

The main difference between left and right wing extremism is that corporate interests ally with the right.  Right wing extremists might be crazy, but the corporate interests are not, and they know how to manipulate the crazies on the right.

So the idea that what we're seeing now isn't as bad as what we saw in the sixties and seventies on the left might be true on one level, but it's not on another.  Left-wing extremists were always fringe and never accomplished much of anythiing; right-wing extremists might be fringe in their psychology, but they are not fringe politically, and they have been fairly effective in getting their agenda recognized and implemented. The left never had a major cable news station, and it never had major funding. You don't have to be a majority to dominate in the political and economic spheres.  You just need to have a lot of money and most of the power and an effective media megaphone.

Drum Optimistic about Meaningful Healthcare Reform

I'm not, but here's Drum's thinking:

Republicans have been given every chance and have obviously decided to obstruct rather then work on a bipartisan compromise.  So the Blue Dogs and centrist Dems feel like they're covered on that angle.  What's more, the townhalls have shown them what they're up against: if they don't pass a bill — if they cave in to the loons and demonstrate that their convictions were weak all along — they're probably doomed next year.  Their only hope is to pass a bill and look like winners who get things done.

When you're up against a wall, you do what you have to do.  Politically, Dems have to succeed, and at this point they've all had their noses rubbed in the fact that the only way to succeed is to stick together.  What's more, Barack Obama has a pretty good knack for coming in after everyone else has talked themselves out and cutting through the haze to remind people of what's fundamentally at stake.  If he can do that again, and if he has the entire Democratic caucus supporting him, they can win this battle.

Nearly every Democrat now has a stake in seeing healthcare reform pass.  The devil, of course, is in the word "nearly," but at this point even Ben Nelson probably doesn't want to be the guy to sink a deal if he's literally the 60th vote to get something done.  It's usually possible to pass a bill when everyone's incentives are aligned, and right now they're about as aligned as they can be.  That's why, on most days, I remain optimistic.

UPDATE: A commenter at James Joyner's site describes Obama's style this way: “He operates like a community organizer: let people have their say, let them wear themselves out, then step in and define the consensus.”  At his best, I think that gets it about right. (Source)

I agree that the Dems will lose if they appear as losers, and that should be motivation for them to pull together to get something done.  Something major will get done, I'm sure.  Bush got something major done, too--the Medicare Prescription Drug Program. If the final bill looks too much like the Bush bill in its essentials, the Dems will still look like losers. Because they will be losers. They'll spin it as best they can, but they won't fool anybody except those who want to be fooled.

We don't know for sure where Obama is going to come down on this until next Wednesday. The indications that Obama is turning out to be a triangulating Clintonite sellout--and seems quite happy to be--are pretty discouraging. I hope those indicators are more telling about some of Obama's staff than they are about him, but we'll see.

Let's just wait to see what happens next Wednesday.  We can speculate on what it means for the future when it becomes clearer what will really be on the table.

P.S. This talk of triggers might be something I could get behind.  It depends on how they are structured and if they have real teeth. The key for me is getting things going in the right direction.  I don't think we need the whole package immediately.

Progressives: Forget about Movement Conservatives . . .

. . . and get your own house in order.

The problem does not lie in that movement conservatives do what they do.  We understand that. And yes, of course, it must be continually exposed and vigorously resisted. But the more fundamental problem lies in that, with some exceptions, progressives mostly complain about conservatives rather than getting organized and fighting back.

If Chuck Todd is right, and Obama really wants the Senate Finance Committee version of the bill, then he must be fought. I hope it's not true, but if it is, then he's no longer on the right side with regard to reforming healthcare. We must find ways to back the people who are willing to take him on--not from the left or right, but from all those who care about democracy. This is not a left or right issue; it's about whether the country is going to be ruled primarily to serve corporate interests or the public interest. 

If Obama ok with or just doesn't care that he's abetting the former, I can no longer support him.  I am so sick of pols who think they are doing the smart thing, and that fighting for the right thing is unimportant. I supported Obama over Clinton precisely because I thought that he differed from her in that regard.  But we're getting from him the same tired Clintonian triangulation.  It's time for these pols to learn that it just won't work anymore; that it's no longer the smart move.

Once again, I refer you to the efforts of FireDogLake, which is trying to organize around keeping the 65 House Dems firm in their resolve to fight the president or anybody who is willing to jettison the public option.