On election night, 2008, when the word went out that Barack Obama had been declared the winner, there was quite literally dancing in the streets. All over America, people hungry for change and fed up with eight years of George Bush running our country into the ditch were overjoyed that hope had been chosen over fear of more of the same. Young people, black people, immigrants, and all kinds of Americans who wanted a new day were out in the streets dancing and celebrating. A friend visiting from Sweden's Social Democratic Party was out on U Street in DC as throngs danced their butts off, weeping with pure joy, and he turned to a friend and said, "Are all American elections like this?" The answer is a big no; election night 2008 was different because it felt like change was coming.
A couple million people showed up for the inauguration, shattering all previous records. In early 2009, one of DC's big progressive groups, the Campaign for America's Future, announced their annual conference, for years entitled Take Back America, was changing its name (to America's Future Now) because, well, America had been taken back from the right wingers who had been governing it. I had just written a book (The Progressive Revolution: How The Best In America Came To Be) about how progressives had every so often in our country's history been able to create a big change moment, and I was on my book tour telling audiences that we had a chance at creating another one.
A year later, it all feels a lot different, doesn't it? A version of health care reform is still alive, but struggling mightily and so weakened by concessions to insurers and drug companies that there's a palpable sense of disappointment by the progressives who have been fighting for it. Climate change legislation is stalled in the Senate after barely getting through the House in highly compromised fashion. There's been no action on labor law reform. The Obama administration has deported more undocumented immigrants than Bush did in 2008, and there's still no movement on long promised immigration reform. The war in Afghanistan has been escalated twice by President Obama. Almost 20% of Americans are unemployed or under-employed. Financial reform is on the verge of being watered down to almost nothing, and the big banks on Wall Street are still running roughshod over the rest of us- economically and politically.
It's time for a different kind of dancing (and marching and chanting and raising hell) in the streets - the kind where regular folks tell the politicians and the special interests we aren't going to sit around let them ruin our country.
More on that, and two event announcements, in the extended entry.
In the midst of the gutting of the core provisions of the health care bill is some unnoticed Senate floor action. I am just amazed at the news out of the Senate last night:
In a victory for President Obama and his allies in the pharmaceutical industry...
Let me stop there and say that line alone is unsurprising, but enough to make you vomit-
...the Senate today turned aside a bid by a bipartisan group of lawmakers to make it easier to import cheaper prescription drugs from Canada and Western Europe -- a proposal that threatened to derail the Democrats' landmark healthcare bill.
The vote on the amendment -- cosponsored by Sens. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.) -- was 51-48, nine short of the 60 needed to pass.
The politically charged amendment held up the Senate for a week as drug companies, the White House and lawmakers from states that are home to drug makers fought to derail the proposal. Critics, including the Food and Drug Administration, said it would be difficult to implement and hard to guarantee that imported drugs would be safe.
Aside from, as Howie Klein notes, the weird partisan divides over this, what is absolutely amazing to me is how the sanctity of the deal that the White House cut with the pharmaceutical industry trumped an issue with which Democrats have beat Republicans over the head since 2003, when I remember the Medicare prescription drug bill did not include such a provision and Democrats were howling about it at the time.
The drug amendment had in the past enjoyed broad support from Democrats -- including Obama -- but the White House and Senate leaders bowed to the pharmaceutical industry and joined their effort to derail it. The administration feared that if the amendment had passed, pharmaceutical companies, which earlier this year struck a deal with the White House to limit the economic impact of a healthcare overhaul on their industry, would turn against the broader health legislation.
You could say the same goes for how the White House has treated insurance companies- after the deal they cut with them, there was nary a peep from the White House until October over an industry Pete Stark said said would be "easy to roll" because no one likes them. Again, years of trashing insurance companies from most of the Party, but a reversal from the Administration because of the deal. I wouldn't care as much if I didn't think that move may actually have been detrimental to the entire fight. Health insurance companies worked to gut the bill anyway.
The list of core progressive principles and initiatives that have been sacrificed on the altar of "some bill, any bill" lengthens.
Digby (taking numbers and quoting from Markos) had a great post over the weekend about the single most urgent topic facing Democrats going into the 2010 elections: the lack of enthusiasm by Democratic voters about voting next year. I have cited some polling and turnout statistics in the past from Greenberg Quinlan Rosner, and Digby focused on another polling fact that is as harrowing a number going into an election year as I have seen in a long time:
From the new Daily Kos/Research 2000 poll:
We have added a new feature on our weekly national poll -- a gauge of voter intensity. The question offered to respondents is a simple question about their intentions for 2010:
QUESTION: In the 2010 Congressional elections will you definitely vote, probably vote, not likely vote, or definitely will not vote?
Markos writes:
The results were, to put it mildly, shocking:
Two in five Democratic voters either consider themselves unlikely to vote at this point in time, or have already made the firm decision to remove themselves from the 2010 electorate pool. Indeed, Democrats were three times more likely to say that they will "definitely not vote" in 2010 than are Republicans.
The way some Democrats want to respond to numbers like these is pure and simple death wish politics. It's the bizarre inside-the-Beltway centrism that cares more about what corporate lobbyists and CBO scoring than about what anyone who might actually vote thinks: don't do anything too tough to Wall Street, don't create jobs because it will add to the deficit, don't put anything into health care reform that voters might actually notice for the next five years, and be "fair" to the poor insurance companies.
White House health reform czar Nancy-Ann DeParle said the president was moving as quickly as possible. She said that the insurance industry cannot be forced to accept people irrespective of preexisting conditions until everyone is required to have insurance, and that the administration does not want such a requirement until the exchanges are up and running.
Insurance companies have been making enormous profits for decades now by hiking prices through the roof and denying care to sick people, and we are going to worry about being fair to them in the transition to a better health care system? When we are going to mandate that people buy insurance, and subsidize them to do so, after the new system is in place? C'mon now. If the insurance companies have to reduce their profit margins for a few years, I don't think we should be shedding any tears for them.
Democrats have to figure out how to produce real benefits for real people now, not in some future years from now. A new poll out from Democracy Corps nails it: rather than bragging about the signs of progress in the economy when voters don't feel them yet, Democrats need to focus with urgency on jobs, and other tangible benefits voters can see and feel. Trickle-down economics (first get the banks healthy, then eventually everyone will get jobs) and health care reform with benefits kicking in for people in 2014 will make the 2010 elections ugly.
It's time to kill off death wish politics in the Democratic Party.
Interest groups, too, deserve opportunities to make their cases, Stark said. He singled out the American Medical Association, the American Hospital Association and the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America.
The health insurance industry, Stark predicted, would never support a Democratic health reform effort, but he said they could be easily overcome.
"They're going to be easy to roll because nobody likes insurance companies," he said.
Hmm. That one didn't quite work out.
As you might have noticed lately, I am big on accountability, learning from our mistakes, and improving tactics. What is interesting to me about health care reform in the case of insurance companies is whether the game was fixed, or an opportunity was missed.
On the one hand, you could make the game was fixed argument that insurance companies are more moneyed and powerful, have more lobbyists and connections, etc. I've also heard the campaign finance argument, which is we'll never achieve fundamental reform not just on health care but on lots of other issues until we have fundamental campaign finance and lobbying reform to establish public financing of elections, eliminate the revolving doors between members of Congress and K Street, and so forth. Therefore Pete Stark is wrong that they could be easily overcome because he forgets that issue.
On the other hand, I recall that when Obama gave his late October radio address ripping insurance companies, the first thought in my head was "it's about time". Other friends said that with his cutting of all these side deals with pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, insurance companies to find cost savings, he in turn agreed to shy away from such rhetoric, which was a mistake. Therefore Pete Stark was right that insurance companies are easy to demonize, it's just that our side never took advantage of it.
I tend to think it's actually something of both, but it's worth thinking about for future fights.
The new Q-poll has Gov. Corzine down by only four points- a narrowing from 10 points from an earlier poll this month. This combined with the Democracy Corps poll last week (1 point down) is good news. The overall race has been narrowing for awhile:
Chris Christie, who recently said insurance companies should not be forced to cover mammograms for women in their 20s because those who get breast cancer "are an exception", has his worst favorability of the campaign in the poll- 38% favorable, 38% unfavorable. New Jersey law mandates that health insurance companies operating in the state are required to provide a minimum level of care- including covering mammograms- and Chris Christie, facing a right-wing primary challenger earlier this year, proposed letting insurance companies opt out of those.
It reminds me of what Rep. Alan Grayson said on the House floor yesterday, outlining the GOP health care plan- "Don't get sick. And if you do get sick, die quickly!"
If you haven't taken action for Corzine yet, we're in the stretch run on the campaign. You can watch and post this ad on your Facebook and Twitter account, send around to your friends in the state, and sign up to help defeat Christie and insurance company backers here.
Unbelievable. Yesterday most of California's major insurance corporations (Blue Shield, Kaiser, Cigna, etc. etc.) testified in support of Arnold Schwarzenegger's healthcare reform bill…and the donations they have given to Assemblymembers was money well-spent, as the bill passed and was sent to the Senate.
While politicians debate individual mandates-a/k/a forcing Americans to purchase expensive, unworkable insurance products from the very corporations who brought you our healthcare disaster-more evidence rolls in about how Americans are being bankrupted by their health insurance.
Maybe this is the moment that crystallizes it all: Rudy Giuliani has to flat-out lie in order to argue against a guaranteed healthcare on the single-payer model. Worst of all, he trades on his own cancer diagnosis to prop up a healthcare system that is failing many other cancer patients. It's a perfect symbol for the twilight of a decrepit insurance-based healthcare system.
I hate to be melodramatic, but that's pretty much what it comes down to.
At least according to today's report finding that America is last among industrialized democracies in terms of infant mortality. Because our healthcare system is set up to guarantee billions of dollars of profit to unnecessary insurance corporations, kids born here are more likely to die than they are in countries with guaranteed healthcare through the single-payer model.
Aug. 28 (Bloomberg) -- The number of people in the U.S. without medical insurance rose 5 percent to a record 47 million in 2006, the largest increase in four years, even as poverty fell and household incomes rose.
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