Health Wars (8/21/09)

One thing every American ought to have learned by now is never trust a Democrat - particularly with qualifiers:

[House Majority Leader Steny] Hoyer (D-MD) emphasized his support for a public option in a teleconference call with reporters, but also said he wants to ensure Congress sends a bill to the president.

“I’m for a public option, but I’m also for passing a bill,” he said. Democrats believe the public option is necessary, useful and important, he added, “be we’ll have to see.”

He then said there are many other important parts of healthcare legislation that have been approved by three committees in the House.

President Barack Obama already has signaled he won’t insist that a public option be included in final healthcare legislation, and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius on Sunday opened a firestorm with the political left by saying that a public option was “not essential” to a healthcare bill.

Hoyer has long been seen as a voice for centrist Blue Dog Democrats, who have reservations about the public option.

Saying the "public option" could go is a far cry from saying it's gone, as has been flatly stated by Kent Conrad (D-ND) over in the Senate.  With Crazy Nancy Pelosi guaranteeing her caucus's Bolsheviks a public option, could Hoyer trying to mollify his Mensheviks be the prelude to a Donk civil war? 

I doubt it.  All Hoyer is really saying is what 20th century Democrats used to understand implicitly: incrementalism.  You get what you can on each legislative sortie and come back for more on the next one.  Keep up the leftward pressure but not so hard as to provoke a backlash that costs seats and time and ground that have to be regained.

But we know who runs the show in the House majority, and it ain't Steny Hoyer.  Thus will the Dems end up with the worst of both worlds: House passage of the "public option" on the cap & trade template with just enough Blue Dog "yeas" to tar the whole pack of them with the culpability for it, and a Senate-imposed final version that is along the incrementalist, public option-less lines for which Hoyer is appealing, rendering the "yea" sacrifices of aforesaid BD's futile - as well as royally pissing off the hard left.

THAT's when the civil war will begin - along with speculation as to whether Red Barry will sign or veto - and Ensign Ed can pass me the popcorn.

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Do ya get the feeling that RNC Chairman Michael Steele knows a bluff when he calls one?  I think the colloquial version of the thought is, "If they coulda, they already woulda."

But this really is a "Waterloo moment" for Barack Obama.  He's in a pickle of his own creation.  He used the "crisis/panic/stampede" template to pass Hogzilla, selling it as an instant recovery-generator it was never going to be, guaranteeing his own near-term discreditment.  That, in turn, has derailed the same tactic from blitzkrieging BarryCare into law and into this ditch where truth-realizing, angry majority opposition is backdrafting at the same time that his own Marxist base is recognizing the growing likelihood that their limitless socialist utopian expectations of stealth single-payer are going to be heaved overboard to save their clay-footed "messiah's" face.  The former don't want their country "transformed" and their health insurance coverage taken away from them piecemeal, and the latter demand nothing less than that their president and congressional majorities make the PR banzai charge, no matter how many seats they lose in 2010 and 2012.

And trapped in the middle of this tempest is the man who wouldn't recognize statesmanship or political modesty if both double-teamed his ass.

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Yet we're supposed to believe that Dr. Chicago is so selflessly and heroically committed to this cause that he's willing to sacrifice his presidency for it?:

AP points out the ducking and dodging in which The One has engaged, which reflects clearly for anybody willing to see how flatfootedly dumbfounded he was that the "hopeandchange" spell broke, how thoroughly he appears to have actually come to believe the Himalayas-esque mountain range of his own "messianic/transformation/realignment" hype, and how helplessly paralyzed he is at the specter of falling from being the anointed faceman of a continental personality cult to merely an unpopular, embattled politician in a democracy his own conceited extremism cost him the time necessary to disembowel to make way for his own presidency-for-life.

What we have to understand is that every last one of us has, I believe, vastly underestimated Barack Obama's ambitions.  He didn't want to be "another FDR"; he wanted to surpass FDR.  He didn't want to take America on a "great leap forward"; he wanted to cut directly to the finish line and seize the United-Soviet-Socialist-States-of-Obamerika prize for himself.  And he didn't want to do it by chicanery or authoritarianism, but at the summit of a Palm Sunday-esque, unanimous, deafening tide of public adulation and worship.

Not unlike the philosophy of Gul Dukat:

A true victory is to make your enemy see they were wrong to oppose you in the first place; to force them to acknowledge your greatness.

B.O. thought that already happened last November.  Now he's discovering how resoundingly that is not the case.

Leaving at least some of his more lucid disciples to wonder what might have been:

So imagine if Obama had focused on fixing the economy, and chosen presidential power over congressional accommodation and constructed his American Recovery and Reinvestment Act as a true, immediate stimulus without the pork and paybacks.

He then could have pushed through tougher regulation of financial institutions, making it clear people were paying for their sins, and would have a much harder time doing it again. This would have delighted the left and perhaps bought Obama more durable support among independents. Instead, the left thinks he’s beholden to investment banks, and much of the public sees no consequences for the financial mess.

Add in some serious budget cuts, and Obama would have positioned himself as a new kind of liberal with the courage to tame Washington and Wall Street, as promised. Under this scenario, Obama might be getting more credit for the economic recovery that appears to be under way. This would have positioned him to win health-care reform starting next year — a mighty achievement, and clear vindication against the doubters.

Sure, that scenario has its holes: (1) "true, immediate" stimulus means supply-side tax cuts, which Mike Allen and Jim Van de Hei don't have the scroat to mention and would have been anethema to Red Barry anyway; (2) further crippling the financial sector with federal chains would have been both recessionary and wouldn't have punished the true architects of the Wall Street meltdown - namely, its Obamunist beneficiaries; (3) on "serious budget cuts," see "tax cuts," and besides, he's already gutting Pentagon spending; (4) there'd have been no "economic recovery" for him to take credit for, any more than in this quantum reality, and for basically the same reasons.  The only improvement in this alternate scenario is that he'd have waited to accelerate his runaway debt-tsunami until his second year, and the health care debacle would have taken place twelve months closer to the 2010 midterms, where the Donk wipeout would have been guaranteed and complete.

In essence, Allen and Van de Wai are slamming B.O. for not repeating Bill Clinton's White House-driven second-year template that yielded no health care bill and massive mid-term losses.  Whereas their lord and savior will probably get some kind of bill to sign, even if it does nothing more than expand the federal band-aid subsidy, and have a year to recover from this self-inflicted beat-down.

Of course, being who and what he is, Barack Obama will be incapable of learning any lesson that requires ingestion of the crap sandwich with humility dressing.  If he had his way, he'd ride the public option and his presidency straight into the f'ing ground.  The silver lining irony for him is that he's so egregiously screwed the pooch on this mess that that decision is largely outside his substantially diminished power to make.