On Saturday Mr. Obama responded, this time criticizing Mr. Edwards by name. He declared that "We want to reduce the power of drug companies and insurance companies and so forth, but the notion that they will have no say-so at all in anything is just not realistic."
Hmm. Do Obama supporters who celebrate his hoped-for ability to bring us together realize that "us" includes the insurance and drug lobbies?
O.K., more seriously, it's actually Mr. Obama who's being unrealistic here, believing that the insurance and drug industries - which are, in large part, the cause of our health care problems - will be willing to play a constructive role in health reform. The fact is that there's no way to reduce the gross wastefulness of our health system without also reducing the profits of the industries that generate the waste.
As a result, drug and insurance companies - backed by the conservative movement as a whole - will be implacably opposed to any significant reforms. And what would Mr. Obama do then? "I'll get on television and say Harry and Louise are lying," he says. I'm sure the lobbyists are terrified.
As health care goes, so goes the rest of the progressive agenda. Anyone who thinks that the next president can achieve real change without bitter confrontation is living in a fantasy world.
Democrats in 2009 are going to have a really hard time getting anything done, for the same reasons the Senate leadership is passing everything Bush wants right now. There are a very skewed set of incentives in place among decision-makers, and they won't give them up easily. I had an interesting conversation with an outraged pollster last night on Iraq, where she kept bitterly talking about how the Democrats aren't paying attention to the polls and voting to get us out of Iraq. "Immigration is complicated, the numbers are complicated. But Iraq, it's easy. The public wants the war to end."
She kept expressing bewilderment at how they could make such stupid political decisions. I walked her through my pet theory, which is that these people like having an excuse to write a blank check to whoever they want whenever they want, usually in the order of $100B, every six months or so, and they don't mind paying the cost, which is other peoples' children. Any deviance from voting for such blank checks, even if politically popular, makes other decision-makers nervous; if you abandon us on such a lucrative game, how do we know you won't do so when dealing with drug companies or oil companies? It's a bit like corrupt cops not trusting a cop who refuses a bribe, as per American Gangster.
Clinton and Obama both think that you can sit down and negotiate with these people, that they are reasonable and data-driven and deal in good faith. But they are not. They operate from a calculus of raw power, and evidence doesn't matter to them. Iraq and our corporate dominated state is a systems problem requiring a realization that the different social norms reinforce each other. Without a leader willing to fight, the President will be swallowed up into a vast complex of decisions he just has to make, all of which are somehow strangely conservative, coincidentally. Of all the candidates, only Edwards is running a race on this dynamic. If Clinton and Obama see it too, they are keeping their opinions very quiet.
And not that this is related, but the Governor of Iowa, Mari Culver, endorsed John Edwards today. He's hanging in there. |
