The base has fallen into line. And if Rahm was right all along that progressives, essentially, could be taken for granted, he's about to go from punching bag to hero in the eyes of many Democrats.
That statement is only supportable if you fail to remember what the actual health reform debate was like two months ago. In the wake of the Massachusetts special election, Rahm Emanuel wanted to scrap even the Senate health reform bill and pass something smaller:
Emanuel, for his part, is now pushing for a stripped-down health care bill that could be passed within a few weeks and force Republicans, for a change, to take a few tough votes.
The House should pass the Senate's health insurance reform bill - with an agreement that it will be fixed, fixed right, and fixed right away through a parallel process. [. . . ] The House and Senate must move forward together. And, there is no reason they cannot move forward together to make those changes through any means possible -- whether through reconciliation or other pieces of moving legislation.
Senior Congressional aides said that lawmakers and the White House were increasingly focused on a plan by which the House would adopt the health care bill approved by the Senate on Dec. 24, with any changes made in a separate bill using the budget reconciliation maneuver.
Instead of scrapping the Senate health care bill and passing something stripped down, Congress is moving to pass the Senate health reform bill with improvements through the reconciliation process. Which is what almost everyone except Rahm Emanuel wanted.
It beats me how someone can have the exact opposite of his recommended path forward come to pass, and still be vindicated. Emanuel wanted to water down the Senate bill further, but instead it will be getting stronger through the reconciliation process as progressives were demanding. Yeah, Emanuel really paved the way forward after the Massachusetts debacle.
The Washington Post reports today that President Obama's advisors are planning to recommend that the administration reverse its decision to try the September 11 suspects in federal court and instead opt for military commissions. That's more than just disappointing, given the overwhelming consensus of military and legal experts that civilian courts are more effective for prosecuting terrorists. If the president were to heed that advice, it would also be astonishingly bad politics.
Today, Washington Post "reporter" Jason Horowitz has this scoop: Rahm Emanuel is the cool voice of reason in the White House. Just last week, his colleague at the Post, Dana Milbanks, had this point: Obama needs Rahm.
Huh. Did the first story not get enough play so they decided to run it again?
Let's take a look at Mr. Horowitz's story:
Rahm Emanuel is officially a Washington caricature. He's the town's resident leviathan, a bullying, bruising White House chief of staff who is a prime target for the failings of the Obama administration.
Really? I don't think I've seen the "Rahm is wrong" angle get much play on the front page of, say, the Washington Post. What you mean to say, Mr. Horowitz, is that bloggers don't like Rahm, right?
But a contrarian narrative is emerging: Emanuel is a force of political reason within the White House and could have helped the administration avoid its current bind if the president had heeded his advice on some of the most sensitive subjects of the year: health-care reform, jobs and trying alleged terrorists in civilian courts.
Translation: This contrary narrative is emerging because I'm writing it right now. Or, rather, my colleague Dana Milbank wrote a story last week based on mostly anonymous sources and I'm using those same nameless guys in my own story today. So now there are two stories by two different reporters which establishes a trend. People are talking! There's a pro-Rahm boomlet!
It is a view propounded by lawmakers and early supporters of President Obama who are frustrated because they think the administration has gone for the perfect at the expense of the plausible. They believe Emanuel, the town's leading purveyor of four-letter words, a former Israeli army volunteer and a product of a famously argumentative family, was not aggressive enough in trying to persuade a singularly self-assured president and a coterie of true-believer advisers that "change you can believe in" is best pursued through accomplishments you can pass.
See? People are talking! "Lawmakers" and "early supporters" and "they" and others too!
...The pairing [Obama and Rahm] made sense, but things haven't worked out as expected. And in the search for what has gone wrong, influential Democrats are -- in unusually frank terms -- blaming Obama and his closest campaign aides for not listening to Emanuel.
So who are these "influential Democrats?" The story quotes only one on-the-record Democrat with an explicitly pro-Rahm comment: Rep. Debbie Wasserman Shultz. Others offer rather neutral-sounding analysis and others are anonymous. Two on-the-record sources that emerge in Horowitz story as Rahm supporters: Republican Senators Lindsey Graham and Olympia Snowe.
So there you have it. Horowitz's point: President Obama should have listened to Rahm (and Republicans) more and to "idealistic" voices less.
Nevermind that many so-called idealists have been a better source of "Realpolitik" on things like health care reform than inside-the-beltway experts. One example? Current efforts to pass health care reform through reconciliation were pushed by Chris Bowers and others a full year ago. Back then, getting simple majorities was a low bar and we'd have moved on to other battles long ago. In today's political climate it's a much closer call.
LANGUAGE WARNING: Today's story is uncharacteristically blunt, and from this moment forward we will be using lots of inappropriate language in making our points.
It is by now fairly well known that Rahm Emanuel, President Obama's White House Chief of Staff, had a bit of a blow-up with liberals who were ready to start running ads against "blue dog" Democrats who were working very hard to shut down the health care reform effort.
Now we're not gonna get in the middle of that argument today; instead, since we're finally getting a chance to talk, I figured me and Rahm could get a few other things out of the way that have been on everyone's mind for the past year or so.
This is basically Rahm saying on his way out, I was right all along and these guys were wrong. Maybe it's a last minute attempt at a Hail Mary to swing the decision in his favor if he can start a conversation in DC about how he had offered better advice than the other three to Obama (by the way, everything he claims to have been right about inside the article was disastrous advice that led Obama further and further away from his voters). But either way, that means he thinks he is very close to being on his way out the door.
If anything can be said of Barack Obama, it's that no one is so indispensable to him that he won't gladly feed that person to the sharks in order to save his political ambitions. This was evident in his vicious attacks on Jeremiah Wright during the campaign, and in his dismissal from the White House any and all of the few progressives in it. That Emanuel, perhaps the most powerful mouth blabbing in Obama's ear to shunt aside the Democratic base in favor of large business interests, is expendable is indicative of just how worried the chief executive is about his prospects for re-election and his party's all-but-nonexistent control over Congress.
So perhaps Emanuel is finally on his way out, as he should be. But if he is, he certainly should not be the last to go. All of Team Obama must be replaced with genuine progressives, people from among the base of the party that put him in office. If they don't, then all Emanuel's departure from the White House will be is more window dressing on a crumbling house.
Like most DC political people, I read the recent flurry of articles/posts about the palace intrigue at the White House with interest. These kinds of pieces about a struggling President are as predictable as the sun coming up in the east and the Washington area being shut down by a snowstorm. But at the end of the day, who's up and down at the White House is not what matters. Only two things matter in terms of the success of Barack Obama's Presidency:
Will the economy create enough jobs so that American workers feel that real progress is being made economically?
Will the American people feel that Obama has had a decent measure of success in changing Washington's track record at failure on the big challenges facing us and failure to curb the power of the big special interests?
Obama's sagging numbers, and the twin electoral cancers that brought down Democratic statewide candidates in VA, NJ and MA - working-class voters turning against us and base voting Democrats not turning out to vote - are both tied directly to the lack of progress on these two things. It was no surprise at all that Democracy Corps found in its research about the State of the Union speech that the only big place the President lost people was when he tried to take credit for an economy turning around - they just aren't feeling it yet. And the polling of base voters who didn't turn out shows that they are disappointed (a) with the economy and (b) that the special interests still seem to be running Washington.
Like all Democratic Presidents in my lifetime, President Obama has done some things well, and been disappointing in others. I continue to credit him for taking on big challenges like health care, financial reform, and climate change. But for me, the most troubling thing about Obama has been that even as he has tried to take on big issues, he hasn't seemed to have grasped the need to go beyond the conventional wisdom of the Washington establishment in terms of how to get them done. He pushed through a good stimulus bill, but accepted in advance the advice of those who said it didn't need to be bigger. He listened to the establishment economists who said we just shore up the big banks first and blithely counseled him that jobs were a lagging indicator, and he accepted it. He listened to advisers who told him that the only way to get legislation passed was to cut deals with industry lobbyists. He listened to political advisers who consistently counseled him that the base could be ignored while he courted the "middle" (which in DC is not defined as actual (mostly working class) swing voters but as powerful corporate lobbyists). He allowed administration progressives like Van Jones and Greg Craig to be thrown to the wolves.
It doesn't matter who is top in the administration inner circle if Obama's core governing style is to accept what traditional neo-classical economists and conventional wisdom advisers say. What Obama has to do is to embrace the change he promised to represent, to break out of the prison of the CW establishment and special interest lobbyists. He does it sometimes - like taking on the banks regarding student loans and embracing bolder financial regulations in recent weeks, or pushing back against conservative Democrats who wanted to give up on health care reform when Scott Brown won. But he has to embrace the bigger, bolder change in everything if he's going to fix our broken economy and broken government.
Does that mean shaking up his White House staff, replacing Rahm as Chief of Staff? I don't know, maybe. Rahm has become a dominant COS for an inexperienced President, and he certainly is a creature of CW Washington. While Bill Clinton, whose lack of discipline and disdain for orderly flow chart type of operations meant that he talked and listened to everybody under the sun and took ideas from all over, Obama's sense of order and discipline has meant that Rahm dominates the decision-making process in a way that none of Clinton's Chiefs of Staff did. Maybe that process needs to be broken up. But if Obama brings in someone with the same mindset as Rahm, and keeps to the same top down closed circle, listens only to a few perspectives all of the same inside-DC worldview, replacing Rahm doesn't change anything.
President Obama needs to be the change he ran on. I don't really care who is up or down on his staff as long as he understands that he needs to break out of the DC conventional wisdom that says it's okay for jobs to be a lagging indicator, and it's okay to accept special interests rather than challenge them. When he challenges the establishment, he is at his best. When he pushes back boldly against the usual Washington BS, he wins the hearts of both swing and base voters. Let's hope that he chooses to do it more, not less.
As a background to a jobs bill and the financial regulation package, health insurance reform will drag on for several more weeks, and might never be passed.
As a result of that, climate change legislation is on life support, and will likely be shelved (and even the back-up plan of using the EPA to regulate greenhouse gasses might be shelved).
And, as a result of those delays, immigration reform is almost certainly off the table for 2010.
There's been a lot of analysis about why Democrats lost the Massachusetts Senate race, because it was so obvious. Failing to accomplish what you campaigned on depresses your base, emboldens the enemy and convinces independents that you're a loser. The lesson is not that Democrats went "too far" - but that they didn't go far enough. If I had faith in President Obama and the Democratic Party, I would be hopeful that they learned that lesson. But only one person seems to get it - former DNC Chair Howard Dean - who was unceremoniously kicked to the curb last January. It was Dean who gave Democrats a backbone in the run-up to the Iraq War. It was Howard Dean's "Fifty State Strategy" (as opposed to Rahm Emanuel's recruitment of Blue Dogs) that won Congress in 2006. And it was Dean's playbook that Barack Obama used to beat Hillary Clinton in an historic campaign. Beltway Democrats resent Dean, because he cares more about helping progressives win than stroking their ego. And - what's most unforgivable - he's been proven right.
I don't know if you get to read incoming e-mail. I doubt it, as I know the value of your time in running the country and still finding some room for your wife, children and dog. However, I would like to offer you a couple of points from my not-so-unique position as an unemployed American with two college degrees who worked on your campaign steadily for many months last year... and who is now getting more and more disappointed in your progress, or lack thereof.
As Adam noted in a post earlier today, Lieberman has confirmed that he opposed the Medicare buy-in compromise because Jacob Hacker and Rep. Anthony Weiner supported it.
That isn't surprising. Defeating liberals, in as public a way as possible, has long been a central pillar of "moderate" Democratic strategy. Blue Dogs, Conservadems, the DLC and others believe that they must do everything possible to distance themselves from liberal Democrats in order to be successful. If they are viewed as regular old Democrats, and not as a new wave of bi-partisan, moderate Democrat, then they honestly believe they are screwed. Lieberman is just an especially spiteful version of this.
Given this right-wing Democratic need to defeat liberals as publically as possible, aren't the calls from progressive organizations to defeat the bill actually the action progressives can take that is most likely to help pass the bill? And I am only being a little snarky. As Atrios wrote:
Since all the dirty hippies decided that the public option was what mattered, it was probably inevitable that it would go (I don't know this, I'm hopefully mostly kidding). Pissing off the hippies is what "moderates" do, and as most of them don't have a clue about policy anyway, if the hippies are for it then they know it must be bad.
Along those lines, dirty fucking hippies like digby shouldn't they think lowering the Medicare age is a good idea, because if so it won't happen.
That kind of honesty sure feels like a mistake now. Lieberman might have backstabbed everyone even if we didn't say we liked the compromise, but publically stating our support does not appear to have helped.
Don't you seriously wonder if publically opposing this bill is actually the best way for progressives to pass the bill? Or that supporting the bill now is the best way to defeat it? When one of your roles in the party ecosystem is to be publically humiliated, this sort of frustrated paranoia seems warranted. At all costs, the party must protect the wise, reasoned, bi-partisan, non-ideological centrists who helped bring on every clusterfuck we face as a nation, even if that means opposing the policies that would have prevented those clusterfucks just because those policies are supported by progressives. That certainly seems to be how Rahm Emanuel runs things, and really only marginally different than the way Emanuel's boss has been talking for years now.
Emanuel didn't just leave it to Reid to find a solution. Emanuel specifically suggested Reid give Lieberman the concessions he seeks on issues like the Medicare buy-in and triggers.
"It was all about 'do what you've got to do to get it done. Drop whatever you've got to drop to get it done," the aide said. All of Emanuel's prescriptions, the source said, were aimed at appeasing Lieberman--not twisting his arm.
I contacted a Senate aide to further confirm the story. When I asked the aide if the Huffington Post and TPMDC stories were true, the aide responded "absolutely."
Further, the aide confirmed that Joe Lieberman is lying (I'm not exaggerating the language). Immediately after the Gang of Ten struck a deal on the public option, Harry Reid contacted Lieberman to hear his thoughts. Lieberman indicated that he was liking what he was seeing, and just wanted to wait for the CBO score. For him to change without the CBO score is mendacity, pure and simple.
Finally, the aide also said that this is still about saving lives. We keep talking about cost, but this bill still saves lives. For all of its tremendous disappointments, the aide kept emphasizing that the bill saves lives. This shows, if nothing else, that Alan Grayson's messaging appears to have won the day for Democrats.
I don't really know what to think right now. Too angry to think straight. After a very long campaign, we had appeared to secure a deal that I thought was acceptable. We promptly get stabbed in the back by none other than Joe Lieberman (and the CBO, btw), and then just as promptly told by the White House to accept it all.
The cloture motion on health care reform will be filed either tomorrow or Thursday, setting up a vote two days later. With a very crowded legislative schedule, and demands from the White Hosue to pass the bill in 2009, there really isn't any other option. My bet is that Olympia Snowe will probably vote for the bill now, as will Roland Burris. All of this makes even the unlikely prospect of a no vote from Bernie Sanders on the cloture motion irrelevant. Barring further mendacity, this bill now has sixty votes.
The next step will be the conference committee, unless the White House demands that also gets thrown in the trash to appease Lieberman, or Nelson, or whoever.
A new report from the Huffington Post claims that Rahm Emanuel told Harry Reid to cave to Lieberman's double-cross, and just pass anything:
Rahm Emanuel visited Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid in his Capitol office on Sunday evening and personally urged him to cut a deal with recalcitrant Sen. Joe Lieberman, two Democratic sources familiar with the situation said.
Some readers may not accept reports from anonymous sources. However, consider that if any Senate aide put their name to a report about Rahm s/he would be fired instantly and faced an immediate end to his or her career. The White House deny the report anyway, the vast majority of die-hard Obama administrations believe the White House anyway, and the aide would have been reviled by huge numbers of rank and file Dems. In short, if an aide had been willing to attach his or her name to the report, it wouldn't have changed anything, except ruining the aide's life.
Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA) just walked walked into the Democrats all-important caucus meeting tonight sounding defeatest about the chance that a Medicare buy-in or public option trigger will survive Sen. Joe Lieberman's (I-CT) decision to block the compromises this weekend.
Asked by a reporter if the Medicare buy-in will be pulled out, Harkin said "looks that way," before praising a Democratic health care bill without the two public option compromises.
Earlier today, Matthew Yglesias argued that Matt Taibbi's criticism of the Obama administration on financial policy is off because Congress largely has purview over that policy. Instead, the Obama administration should be criticized for those areas of policy over which it has more direct control:
If you want to complain about the Obama administration, you should complain about their conduct of issues they actually have control over. Foreign policy and the war in Afghanistan, for example.
However, these two Lieberman incidents show that the Obama administration does, in fact, have a lot of influence over many Democrats in Congress on virtually all issues.
By picking Rahm Emanuel as Chief of Staff, President Obama immediately signaled that the White House was not going to use this influence against conservative Democrats in Congress who sought to water down the Democratic agenda. Then again, as I pointed out last night, Democrats in Congress also don't seem interested in putting pressure on the more conservative members of their caucus who seek to water down the Democratic agenda. At the highest levels of the Democratic Party, no pressure ever seems to be applied to conservative Democrats who seek to water down the Democratic agenda.
Whatever pressure is applied is going to have to come from the grassroots. However, there are limits to what pressure we can apply on our own, as Matt Stoller articled in his farewell post on Open Left. Clearly, one year later, we still have a long way to go on solving the Rootsgap. Despite everything that has happened, we are still in a very difficult environment for passing progressive legislation.
Today brings big news about primary challenges to incumbent Democrats in at least three campaigns:
Arkansas Senate, Blanche Lincoln. A new Daily Kos / Research 2000 poll shows incumbent Conservadem Blanche Lincoln is highly vulnerable to a primary challenge from Lt. Governor Bill Halter. Lincoln leads Halter, 42%-26%, even though Halter has not even entered the campaign (yet) and has a name ID 28% lower than Lincoln. That makes this a very winnable campaign for Halter.
Now, Halter is not a hardcore left-winger. As such, even if he enters the campaign, I imagine that many in the netroots won't care to support him. However, I think that would be a real mistake. If we are ever going to get power, we have to demonstrate real consequences for Democrats who lie to us. If Halter runs, it would be an excellent opportunity to deliver that payback.
If we take a pass on delivering payback to Lincoln over her lies because Halter isn't progressive enough, then really no one will give a shit what we think. However, if we deliver that payback, it puts everyone on notice. We have to produce consequence when someone stabs us in the back.
Maryland 4th, Donna Edwards. Speaking of demonstrating consequences, Rahm Emanuel knows how to do that. Back in June, Representative Lynn Woolsey claimed that the White House threatened freshman Democrats who voted against Afghanistan war funding. Given his demeanor and reputation, it doesn't take a genius to figure out that Emanuel was likely doing the threatening.
Donna Edwards was one of the freshman who ended up voting against Afghan war funding. And now, she has a primary challenger from her right:
Prince George's County State's Attorney Glenn F. Ivey said Wednesday that he has decided not to run for county executive and is forming an exploratory committee to look at challenging Rep. Donna F. Edwards in the Democratic primary next year.(...)
"They represent different wings of the party. Edwards is much more liberal, and Ivey is much more moderate," Herrnson said.
Rumors are that Emanuel is encouraging this challenge. Certainly, rumors are far from proof, but it wouldn't be the first time the Emanuel has stepped into a primary, or threatened a progressive.
Georgia 12th, John Barrow. State Senator Regina Thomas is once again challenging Blue Dog John Barrow in this slightly lean-Democratic district. Thomas is looking to make an issue out of Barrow voting for the Stupak amendment, but against the health care reform package. Barrow laughably claims that, despite those votes, he is actually still pro-Obama, pro-choice, and pro-health care reform:
"Why won't he level with the people?" she asked. "The people in the 12th District deserve better."
Barrow spokeswoman Jane Brodsky rejected Thomas' contentions.
"(He) didn't vote against President Obama's health care plan," Brodsky said. "He voted against (House Speaker) Nancy Pelosi's. ..
"Just because he doesn't agree with a particular legislative package doesn't mean he's opposed to reform. He believes we need all the reform we can get, but he's ... for solutions that are actually going to work."
She said he voted for the abortion measure because it applies only to public funds.
"Private plans can still cover elective abortions," she said, "and women can still use their own money to buy such coverage if they choose to do so."
The district is 45% African-American, and the primary electorate is nearly 75% African-American. Barrow won the primary in 2008 due to a combination of Obama cutting an ad for him (the Obama ad was Barrow's entire campaign), and Thomas running a lackluster campaign.
Much will depend on whether Obama is willing to cut an ad for Barrow again. If he is not, then Thomas could unseat Barrow.
Primaries remain one of the few leverage points we have with Congress. I say we lean on the lever as often, and as hard, as possible.
Conventional wisdom has a powerful grip on the minds of most political players inside the beltway, no matter what common sense, actual political reality, the best policy arguments, and actual polling say. Pundits, traditional media reporters, columnists, powerful lobbyists, insiders, White House officials and Senators go into a legislative battle convinced that a certain scenario will play out, and keep telling themselves that over and no matter what. This standard fact of DC life has been especially true in the health care fight, the CW being that a more progressive bill could never get through the Senate, therefore the Senate Finance bill would be the compromise everyone would have to live with if we were going to get health care reform done this year. Sometimes, though, conventional wisdom runs into a brick wall of political reality and common sense, and the latter occasionally prevails, because at the end of the day, elected officials will have to defend their votes made on the floor of the House and Senate. In health care, we may be getting to that moment.
I explain why, and discuss more on the politics of the situation, in the extended entry.
Just in case we hadn't been reminded enough, anonymous centrist Democrats let us know that Rahm Emanuel won the House in 2006, and everything was better when he was around to protect Blue Dogs:
Many centrists credit Rahm Emanuel, now White House chief of staff, then a congressman from Illinois and a member of leadership, for pushing Pelosi to protect vulnerable members. As the former head of the House Democrats' campaign arm, Emanuel had recruited many of them to run in the 2006 election that gave Democrats the majority.
"Rahm could say, 'Nance, I'm the guy who delivered the House.' He had a special ability to talk to her," said a senior Democratic aide.
The idea that Rahm Emanuel, or any other single Democrat, was responsible for Democratic victories in 2006 is preposterous. In 2006, Democrats scored huge picked not only in the House, but also in the Senate, among Governors, and at the state legislature level. Rahm had nothing to do with those elections, all of which went as well, or better, than the House in 2006. It was a national wave, fueled by a horrendous national environment for Republicans. Katrina,. Bush's sub-40% approval ratings throughout 2006, an unpopular war overseas, and a series of corruption scandals (Tom Delay, Mark Foley) put Democrats in a dominant electoral position across the board.
The idea of a singular genius causing historical change through force of will makes for an easy media narrative. It also fits in nicely with simplistic "great man" conceptualizations of history. The truth is, however, that individual campaign operatives often receive way too much credit for their party or candidate's victory in a national election. The overall political environment--shaped by forces far larger than any one campaign or operative--frequently plays the decisive role. In addition to Rahm Emanuel, consider the following:
Karl Rove's "genius" in 2004 for helping Bush win re-election by 2.5%, even though House Republicans won nationally by 2.6%.
The genius of the 2008 Obama team in winning nationally by 7.27%, even though House Democrats won nationally by 8.88%.
I am not arguing that people like Karl Rove, Rahm Emanuel or David Ploufe are ineffectual political operatives. Certainly, they are a lot better at running a national campaign than I am, and none of the squandered the opportunities they were given. However, it does not appear that these three were any better than the operatives leading the other national campaigns for their respective parties in 2004, 2006 or 2008. Republicans across the country did just as well, or better, than Rove in 2004, while Democrats around the country did just as well, or better, than Emanuel in 2006 or Ploufe in 2008.
Even beyond political environments and campaign managers, hundreds of thousands of activists contribute to any national electoral victory. Those are the grassroots activists who need to start receiving more credit, not party leaders. No national electoral victory can be won without massive support from the grassroots.
Rahm's Just A Symptom Of What's Wrong With The Party
A healthy political party wouldn't let a putz like him within 30 miles of real power.
You keep a diverse party together by giving everyone something important that they want, and asking them to sacrifice something less vital. You don't ask all the sacrifices to come from the same people all the time, and you damn sure don't yell obscenities at them when they push back.
This is true regardless of the fact that the folks you're favoring are the least fucking loyal party members, and the ones you're screwing are the most loyal. You're supposed to do it the other way around--another symptom of how failed the Democrats are.
I thought it was worth highlighting again, because it goes right to the heart of the matter about how the Democrats are trying to govern by violating such a fundamental precept of politics. It is, quite literally, insane of them to be acting like this.
I've never quite gotten over our terrible struggle with the liberal suits in the Sixties, who still blame us for the destruction of the Democratic Party, and have absolutely no intention of ever letting the likes of us help to rebuild it.
The good news, I suppose, is that it's still considered impolite to blame Fanny Lou Hamer, or Martin Luther King for upsetting the liberal applecart. Blaming DFHs, though, remains forever in fashion. Swine like Rahm Emanuel take particular delight in it, and why wouldn't they? Without phantom menaces like us lurking in the darkness beyond the DCCC, no one with the slightest commitment to sanity would ever accept the absolute inevitability of their domestic War of Assassins with the Republicans, or their worship, in the national temples of foreign policy, of American manifest destiny in its most decadent and violent forms.
This gets it exactly right. The corporate wing of the party is permanently at war with the party's activist base. Permanently. One might have hoped that Obama would have brought about some sort of truce. After all, it would have been the smart, prudent, pragmatic thing to do.
It is more important that health-care legislation inject stiff competition among insurance plans than it is for Congress to create a pure government-run option, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel said Monday.
"The goal is to have a means and a mechanism to keep the private insurers honest," he said in an interview. "The goal is non-negotiable; the path is" negotiable.
I am pleased by the progress we're making on health care reform and still believe, as I've said before, that one of the best ways to bring down costs, provide more choices, and assure quality is a public option that will force the insurance companies to compete and keep them honest. I look forward to a final product that achieves these very important goals.
What happened here? Rahm likely was blabbering to a reporter and just went with his natural gut instinct -- to be weak, and cave to Republicans. As I told the New York Times Caucus blog recently:
Advisers like Rahm Emanuel operate out of fear — like it’s 1994 — instead of operating like people who just won a huge mandate in 2008. They obviously haven’t mastered the bully pulpit yet, which is a shame since Obama is a master communicator. If Obama insisted on the public option and held rallies in Montana, Nebraska, and Louisiana, it would happen.
Today's quote by Obama was a great step. Good job, White House (minus one). Rallies in Montana, Nebraska, and Louisiana would be another good step.
But here's a step progressives can take without waiting for the White House...
Today, the Progressive Change Campaign Committee will announce to our email list that we're redoubling efforts to push Senate Democrats in the right direction -- buying a second week of TV ads in DC with your name in it. Sign your name at WeWantThePublicOption.com and help us keep these ads on the air as long as possible by chipping in here. (A few $50 contributions allows the ad to run one more time on MSNBC.)
This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to do bold things that truly help people. We can't let scared politicians like Rahm or Ben Nelson mess it up.
We Americans dwell in a consumer plutocracy, and the plutocrats don't even bother to be cute about it any more. Barack Obama, hailed by the geniuses of new media as a populist saviour, has surrounded himself with a team that was already bought and paid for by the financial services industry before they ever walked into the White House.
"And just in case you ever get a big job in Washington, Larry, remember who your friends are!"
George W. Bush remembered his friends who paid him $15 million on a $600K investment in a baseball franchise, and Barack Obama remembers his friend Penny Pritzker, the Queen of Sub-Prime Lending, chief financial officer of his Senate and Presidential campaigns, and Rahm Emanuel remembers his friends among the investment bankers at Wasserstein Perella, who paid him $16.2 million for two years of "work," and it isn't easy to figure out exactly what "work" that was, because Rahm Emanuel was a speech and communication major at Sarah Lawrence and Northwestern, and never had any training whatsoever in accounting, or business, or finance... but he always knew how to follow the money, as a fundraiser for Richard Daley and Bill Clinton, and now Rahm has followed the money all the way to his current job as Chief of Staff and gatekeeper outside the Oval Office.
"If you ever get a big job in Washington, Rahm, remember your friends!"
And the friends remember, too. They remembered Bill Clinton for signing Gramm-Leach-Bliley, and paid him $40 million for speaking, in 2007, alone, and the same friends already remember Tim Geithner.
Tim Geithner is "[a] very unusually talented young man...[who] understands government and understands markets," says Henry Paulson, who gave away more money to the banks than anybody in the history of the world... except Tim Geithner, Larry Summers, Rahm Emanuel, and Barack Obama.
The fight for 2012 is here. Beltway media insiders rejoice!
Who's it going to be? Spunky Sarah? Moneyed Mitt? Holy Huckabee? Some dark-horse candidate flying under the radar? One thing is for sure: While the media clamors for every tiny detail in the looming battle for the Republican presidential nomination, the real fight for 2012 is taking place right before their very eyes.
Two months ago, I entered this race declaring we are in the largest economic crisis since the Great Depression. Every day more and more people lose their jobs, health care, and homes. We are witnessing not the unraveling of a few years of excess, but the insolvency of many of the economic practices and theories that became conventional wisdom over the past 30 years.
Most important of these, and that which has caused the greatest destruction, is the idea that debt is wealth. Over the last 30 years, American wages stagnated and people grew deeper in debt -- their homes, educations, health care, every aspect of life. And at the national level, the story hasn't been much different. We lost manufacturing and borrowed from across the globe. There were only two winners in all this, Wall Street and the banks.
