Health insurers block progress toward universal health care. Big Oil corrupts our energy policy. Banks and lenders make money on the backs of college students forced to repay huge loans. Agribusiness benefits from government subsidies at the expense of small farms.
This was Barack Obama's populist message this morning at the Adeline C. Marston Elementary School here, one of three public campaign stops in the last two days in New Hampshire. To Republicans, casting business as an enemy of change may sound like a tired trope of the left. But Obama laid the blame for inertia on health care, energy independence, and other issues squarely at the feet of select industries and their lobbyists.
On health insurance, for example, Obama repeated his pledge to sign a universal health care bill by the end of his first term, saying, "I shouldn't have better health insurance than you since you're paying the bill for my health insurance."
This is very different than the call for universal health care in January. Today, he's directly blaming the lobbyists and industries. In January, he was blaming cynicism and unnamed skeptics. Here's a representative passage:
For too long, this debate has been stunted by what I call the smallness of our politics - the idea that there isn't much we can agree on or do about the major challenges facing our country. And when some try to propose something bold, the interests groups and the partisans treat it like a sporting event, with each side keeping score of who's up and who's down, using fear and divisiveness and other cheap tricks to win their argument, even if we lose our solution in the process.
Obama has clearly changed his campaign strategy. He's not a natural populist, so this suggests that he has either decided that economic populism will defeat Clinton or that the establishment has accepted that universal health care is going to happen. I think it's the latter, since the neoliberal Hamilton Project people are now beginning to move towards universal health care in return for free-ish trade.
I will note the following is quite interesting.
And he again called for diverting the billions being spent every month in Iraq to domestic programs, such as broadband network expansions and other infrastructure improvements in rural areas.
"I still can't get a cell phone signal when I'm driving through New Hampshire," he said. "How can you do business when you can't get a cell phone signal?"
With Google's bid for the public airwaves, and John Edwards already weighing in on the spectrum auction, now would be a good time to make his position clear and public.
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