Obama's First Year: Who is Obama?

Obama's First Year: Who is Obama?

Lillian Rubin

GRANTED WE projected our fantasies onto him. But it wasn’t just that we deluded ourselves; it was more like a tango, a seductive dance in which we both played a part. We needed to believe, he needed believers. We were a perfect match: our hunger and his promise. After eight years of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Gonzales, Yoo, and the rest, he was like the coming of spring after a treacherous winter—the embodiment of a new era, a new politics, a sense of redemption and renewal. His name was Barack Hussein Obama, and he was the perfect vessel into which to deposit our progressive hopes: a slim, graceful, fiercely intelligent, handsome black man with an easy manner, funny ears, and a gorgeous smile. We fell in love.

That I can even talk about falling in love with a politician sounds ridiculous coming from an old political hand like me—a woman who decades ago (another life, it seems) managed congressional campaigns and saw firsthand how easily politics corrupts. But that was Barack Obama’s genius; he made us forget what we knew. I’m reminded of a book by Julian Barnes, a meditation on life and death, whose opening line is, “I don’t believe in God, but I miss him.” Barack Obama filled the void; he gave us something to believe in. So my heart ruled, even when my brain stirred uncomfortably.

My brain poked me from time to time as we moved through the long campaign and the first months of his presidency. Didn’t he say unequivocally, “Let there be no doubt, I will end this war...and get all of our combat troops out of Iraq within 16 months?” How did that certainty get transformed into the hazy, “In 16 months, we should be able to reduce our combat troops?” He told us he was open to all ideas, yet the advocates for single-payer universal health care were excluded from the table. Timothy Geithner, the Goldman Sachs alumnus, as Secretary of the Treasury! That’s quite a reward for sitting at the head of the New York Fed for five years while the excesses of Wall Street devastated the economy.

Then there’s same-sex marriage. I get it; Obama won’t spend political capital on a fight with Congress to legalize same-sex marriage. But the pen he promised to use to end “Don’t ask, don’t tell” remains capped on his desk. And how do you explain his failure to stand by the assault weapon ban? Does he really believe the Second Amendment gives us the right to carry weapons that can murder dozens of people with a single pull of the trigger? What will he give away next in his quest for a consensus the Republicans are determined not to give him? Okay, okay, I hear you, and I even agree, said my heart. But enough! This is what it means to govern; you have to pick your fights, find the compromise without giving away the principle. Be patient, give him a chance; you’ll see.


SEE WHAT? I never really had an answer. Was I naïve enough to believe that it was only a matter of finding the right time before he’d step up to the change he promised? Perhaps not naïve but hungry enough to believe a full table awaited me. Now, one year into the Obama presidency, I’ve run out of excuses, speculations, and pseudo-explanations. Sure, I can still be moved momentarily by his soaring rhetoric and the subtlety of his mind, but the balance between heart and brain has shifted. I want deeds, not words; I want to hear the whole symphony, not just the melody.

Don’t get me wrong: I know that Barack Obama’s worst is a lot better than George Bush’s best. But I’m like the woman who, when the flames of passion no longer glow so brightly, suddenly notices that the guy she thought was perfect leaves his dirty underwear on the floor and that his most often-used words are I and me. And like her, I find myself asking: What was I thinking? What happened since those days of transformative dreams and inspirational words that spoke of remaking the nation?

It’s easy to say that “the hope and hubris have given way to the daily grind of governance,” as an article in the New York Times put it recently. Or as Anna Quindlen wrote in Newsweek, “This president promised to tackle the big stuff, swiftly, decisively, and in a fashion about which he was unequivocal…For those who yearned for a progressive agenda that would change the playing field for the disenfranchised, he promised to do good. So far he has mainly done government, which overlaps with good too little in the Venn diagram of American public policy.” But talking about the difficulty and complexity of governing in our fractious democracy without attention to the governor misses a vital piece of the story.

Or does it? My divided self surfaces again, this time between the two disciplines to which I owe allegiance: sociology and psychology. My sociological self argues that you can’t leave the social system out of the man. But the psychologist in me, ever wary of a sociology that doesn’t allow for human agency, insists that you can’t leave the man out of the social system. Which leads me to the conviction that if we’re going to talk about the way Obama governs, we have to look back at the social and personal history that formed him: a history that’s unique among American presidents.


TRUE, THE sociologist in me argues, but this also is a unique historical moment. The social, economic and political forces arrayed against Obama are formidable: there is the worst economic debacle since the Great Depression; a Republican opposition that’s little more than a collection of naysayers who live in fear of their right flank and have made the words “moderate Republican” into an oxymoron; a real unemployment rate—not just what the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reports—that’s over 17 percent; a left that’s fractious and conflicted while the right is organized, noisy, and determined; a voracious media whose ever-shorter news cycles need constant feeding so that by now there’s virtually no distinction between the trivial and the momentous, between reality and fantasy, between news and entertainment.

Yes, the psychologist replies, that’s all true. But you forgot to mention that Obama is black. I know we’re not supposed to talk about race; Obama himself would prefer to leave it out of the conversation. But how can we when, whether in support or opposition, so much of the attention to his candidacy rose from that fact? Yes, he’s smart; yes, he can give a great speech; yes, he’s a refreshing change from the past. But he also represents a historic—and for many a frightening—shift in the nation we knew.

How can we leave race out when, early in his run for the presidency, he was too black for whites and too white for blacks; when the threats against his life spiraled upward as it became evident that he was a serious candidate (and continue into his presidency); and when significant numbers of Americans believe Obama is an illegal alien who has no right to be president? “They have taken over the nation,” they cry repeatedly at the anti-Obama rallies that swept the country last summer. “We’re here to take our country back.” Extreme views to be sure, but does anyone really believe that the women and men we saw on our television screens then are alone among Americans who take note of the color of his skin and who respond, for good or ill, to all the social, personal, and historical meanings attached to that single fact?

In Families on the Fault Line, published in 1994, I wrote a chapter titled “Is This a White Country—or What?”—a direct quote from several of the white people I spoke with when I was doing the research for the book. Now the fear that haunted them has come true: California, Texas, and New Mexico are no longer white country, others are not far behind, and Barack Hussein Obama is President of the United States.

Yes, I know that their anger is born out of the social, cultural, and class realities of their lives, and I’ve written about this repeatedly over the last four decades. But I know also that this is a place where sociology and psychology come together: the nexus where race plays itself out in the American culture and consciousness; where we internalize the socially defined status hierarchy that comes with racial definition; where those definitions—and the rules, norms, beliefs, and attitudes that flow from them—come to be embedded in each of us. For Barack Obama, whose life experience has been so profoundly influenced by the conflicts of race, it has been a central organizing feature of his consciousness.

By now everyone knows his story. It’s interesting, heartwarming, even exotic, but we don’t talk much about its deeper meanings—about how it marked him and how it influences the way he governs. Born to a white American mother and a black Kenyan father (who left the family when Obama was two years old), he was raised white but looked black—a child of two worlds who belonged to neither, an adolescent who, he writes in his memoir Dreams from My Father, “was engaged in a fitful interior struggle. I was trying to raise myself to be a black man in America, and beyond the given of my appearance, no one around me seemed to know exactly what that meant.”

Except for a few early years in Jakarta, Indonesia, where he wasn’t likely to encounter a black face, Obama was raised largely by his white grandparents in Honolulu, Hawaii, where the black population in 1960 was a scant 0.8 percent. By the time he was nine years old, his racial consciousness—his otherness—exploded in his face when he came across a photograph in Life magazine of a black man who tried to peel off his skin: an image that, he writes, “permanently altered” his vision of himself and the world. “That one photograph told me that there was a hidden enemy out there, one that could reach me without anyone’s knowledge, not even my own.” Suddenly he noticed what he hadn’t seen before: “Cosby never got the girl in I Spy, the black man on Mission Impossible spent all his time underground, there was nobody like me in the Sears, Roebuck Christmas Catalog.”

Nor was anyone like him at his school in Honolulu. He was a sophomore in high school before another black boy, Ray—the son of a military family transferred from Los Angeles to a base nearby—entered the school. Although Ray was two years older and a senior, Obama recalls, “We fell into an easy friendship due in no small part to the fact that together we made up almost half the black high-school population.” Ray, a savvy urban kid, introduced Obama to elements of black culture about which he knew little, telling him tall tales and true stories about what it was to grow up black in a big city on the mainland, talking about the racial slights and slurs of his experience—all with anger, a shrug, and an explanation: “That’s just how white folks will do you.”

For Obama it was a revelation but not one he could embrace comfortably. “White folks,” he writes, “itself was uncomfortable in my mouth; I felt like a non-native speaker tripping over a difficult phrase.” Not that he didn’t have his own experience with being called “a coon” by a classmate, with a woman in his apartment building who was so frightened by his presence in the elevator she called the janitor to report a stalker, and with a tennis coach who told him not to touch the printed match schedule because his “color might rub off.” But how could he generalize about the cruelty of white folks when the blood of his white kin coursed through his veins and when the closest and most loved people in his life were white?

But somewhere inside he knew what he didn’t really want to know. For by then he understood that his grandparents, transplants from Wichita, Kansas, lived with typical white American stereotypes about black men as the alien, frightening other. Reflecting on this painful knowledge, he writes, “They sacrificed again and again for me. They had poured all their lingering hopes into my success. Never had they given me reason to doubt their love...And yet I knew that men who might easily have been my brothers could still in-spire their rawest fears.”

Whether in the family or outside it, Obama’s difference created a space that lay unoccupied between them. Outwardly he learned how to get along, to behave in ways that brought him recognition and acceptance; inside he lived on the margins of both the black world and the white one. His strange-sounding name morphed from Barack to Barry as he sought to find common ground with those around him. But a name is more than just a name; it identifies us, tells us who we are, where we belong. It’s not easy for anyone to own a new name. But for Obama, embracing the Barry who replaced Barack was made more difficult by his emerging identity struggles and the reality that nothing could replace the color of skin.


VERY INTERESTING, the sociologist says, but what does all that have to do with the mess he inherited and the politics of the world in which he has to govern? You know as well as I do that it’s the context that counts.

Yes, that’s true, the psychologist replies, and that’s what I’m trying to do—to put his life experience into context. Can you at least grant that the external social world Obama now has to manage is as divided as his internal psychological world has always been—and that this has made a difference in how he navigates the tumultuous waters that surround his presidency? Take a look at Robert Kuttner’s excellent Huffington Post article, “A Tale of Two Obamas.” After attending the president’s jobs summit, he limns the political man: his “pitch perfect” responses to difficult questions versus his actual behavior. “I was reminded, first hand,” Kuttner writes, “what drew so many of us to the promise of this remarkable outsider...[and] I came away even more bewildered and dismayed at the reality.”

This is the puzzle Obama presents: the duality between what seems to be sincere belief and the behavior that doesn’t follow. Sure, he’s responding to the difficult and tendentious politics of our time. Yes, the music slowed at least partly because he started his reelection campaign the day after his inauguration. And maybe, as some argue, he has always been a centrist, and we just didn’t want to believe it.

But, however true all this may be, it doesn’t preclude another truth: that Obama is a charming presence with an easy smile who keeps his own counsel, who stands apart, always aloof, cool, reasonable. The same man who was a community organizer—a job that requires the ability to walk across several worlds, to hold out a conciliatory hand, to seek ways to help people cross the chasms that separate them. A perfect fit with the man who, as president, repeatedly extends his hand to an intransigent opposition, not just because he seeks bi-partisanship for political gain but because he’s compelled to try to bridge the divide now as he did then.

These are the tools and skills Obama developed early on—tools that brought him so successfully from boyhood to manhood, from community organizer to Harvard Law School and editor of the Harvard Law Review, and from there to the Senate and the presidency. And as he looks out from his internal world, it surely seems that he still needs them. For even as the President of the United States, he remains a stranger.

Okay, I get it, grumbles the sociologist, but I don’t wholly buy it. And while I think about it, tell me how you explain his decision to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan if not as a response to unwavering opposition and pressure from the generals. I have no answer that will satisfy either of us, only that it’s what he does—offering something for everybody, not fully satisfying anybody, probably not even himself. Did I once believe in this man, love him? Is it all gone? No. But my heart weeps for what seems like a vanishing dream. And I live with the fear that it may be Barack Obama’s tragedy—and ours—that the very qualities that helped him rise so high will ultimately bring him down.

“You can’t leave it there,” a reader of an earlier version of this article insisted passionately. “We can’t just ask Obama to have a different personality. Where are the picket lines outside the White House calling for a pullout from Afghanistan? Where are the picket lines in front of Wall Street banks and investment houses?”

She’s right, of course. With the election of Barack Obama, liberals and progressives have become the new silent majority. Or perhaps I should say the silenced majority—a silence we’ve imposed on ourselves out of fear of damaging this presidency. It’s time to face it: this is the president we elected, and until we make our voices heard—this is the president we’ll get. As FDR said to John L. Lewis when he reminded the new president that it was his promise to labor that energized a nascent union movement to help ensure his victory, Roosevelt replied, “That’s right; now go out and make me do it.”

Lillian B. Rubin is with the Institute for the Study of Social Change, University of California, Berkeley. She is a sociologist, psychologist, and author of numerous books, the latest of which is 60 on Up: The Truth about Aging in America (Beacon Press, 2007).

Obama: One Year In, Lillian Rubin

Obama's First Year: The Great Overlap and the Stall

Obama's First Year: The Great Overlap and the Stall

Todd Gitlin

IT IS an ancient assumption that tribulation is the threshold to deliverance. George Bush’s rule was so deeply ruinous in so many different ways and for so long that his successor’s campaign automatically lent itself to messianic hopes. It wasn’t that Barack Obama declared himself the messiah—to the contrary—but that many of his supporters tended to project onto him all their pent-up desires, while he practiced not only the politics of overlap but the politics of strategic vagueness. (“Hope.” “Change.” “Change You Can Believe In.”) It was as if in Barack Obama all the desires intersected.

The left wanted, in the main, financial regulation, Keynesian investment, civil liberties, green jobs, laws to cut greenhouse gases, a collaborative foreign policy, and the end of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. The broader center-left, along with independents, had contradictory hopes: intelligence and greater equality, high-mindedness and practicality, simple decencies—transparency and telling the truth, for openers—coupled with a fighting faith. And don’t underestimate the compelling imagery of a black president. As long as he was ideologically simpatico to the great overlap, his skin color was a bonus. But obviously it would not have sufficed.

Ideological overlap was a precondition for victory. But it was never as simple as Obama and his well-wishers said. A lot of Obama’s supporters were Progressives—not in the current sense, a euphemism for liberals, but in the original sense, from the early twentieth century. They wanted, in other words, the politics of high-minded, middle-class idealism: throw the rascals out, clean up corruption, put adversaries around the table and reason together. A lot also were populists, who combined a politics of sturdy, working-class virtue—fairness and less inequality—with a politics of resentment. Progressives are, in the main, insiders—professionals, used to being deferred to. Populists are, in the main, outsiders—amateurs, galvanized by emotional furies. (I wrote about this split, under the rubric of Parties and Movements, in my book The Bulldozer and the Big Tent, and an article in Dissent, “Democratic Dilemmas: The Party and the Movements”.)

A lot of his supporters weren’t sure what they were and wouldn’t even have recognized the categories. But one way or the other they wanted a restart. The contradictions were real and hard to confront. It wasn’t cynical but tactically useful to suppress them.


ANY DEMOCRAT elected in 2008 would have carried a huge weight. Obama, so nicely equipped to bear this weight, found that what it takes to run a triumphant campaign is not what it takes to convert an electoral victory into tangible results. Once in office, he played to what is not only one of his strong suits but the strongest element in his character: Progressivism. He was eminently rational, and sounded that way, if with preacherly overtones. He deliberated. He was mannerly. (When it came to Afghanistan, he was more mannerly to war supporters than those who preferred phasing out.) He was mindful, perhaps too mindful, of the optics of rule—thus the stimulus had to be kept below the (black) magic number of $1 trillion.

He learned from the Clinton health care debacle of 1993-94 that the president cannot ram a bill down the throats of Congress. He veered in the opposite direction, leaving it to the legislators—meaning also the lobbyists—to write a bill. He thought he could drive a wedge into the “Coalition of No” by splitting the pharmaceutical lobby from the insurance lobby. That was a reasonable idea. The problem was that it turned out to be mistaken.

So all summer, everything fell into the hands of the “Gang of Six” from the Senate Finance Committee—representing states that account for a grand 2.6 percent of Americans. The most laughable national legislative body in the world spent the summer in thrall to the Party of No. The Party of No was fueled by an outsider movement, the Tea Party, more sure of itself—more activist!—than its quiescent opposites on the left. The Senate did what it normally does: stall its majority.

Stuck in a morass, Obama hung tough for post-partisanship. Months passed. After his fine September 9 speech to Congress, he retreated back behind the scenes. Republican “moderates”—all two of them from Maine—and that most immoderate quisling from Connecticut took every concession as a reason to demand more. When the country is largely quiescent and distracted, when the media love “death panels,” when the majority party plays post-partisan and the minority doesn’t, when supermajorities are taken for granted as having the moral standing of majorities, then the plutocrat-friendly partisans can stall.

Obama’s only chance of coming out of the stall was to return to campaign mode. But the White House—and the Obama movement of the year before—had let outside energy wither. Obama for America, the 13-million-strong Internet list, changed not only its name to Organizing for America, but its raison d’être. It surely wouldn’t have been easy, either for legal or psychological reasons, to fire up the popular engines again. But we see what happened when no one seriously tried. Enter the Tea Party movement.


AT THIS writing, there can still be a constructive health care bill. But a lot of time and momentum is already lost. We’re still facing double-digit unemployment. Obama has to play his other strong suits. He is a lucid explainer and an inspirational moralist. He needs to combine the two and go post-post-partisan. He can explain that choice to himself because he is an empiricist. (This is the upside of Progressivism.) You try an approach and you see what happens. If playing nice doesn’t bring the necessary results, then you adjust accordingly. The way to adjust now is take a certain risk of looking like an angry black guy—but with a smile. He should welcome the hatred of the corrupt financial industry, the Republicans, and the Tea Party.

The way to go post-post-partisan is to explain patiently, in large forums, how the Republicans erected one brick wall after another. Procedurally, the Party of No availed themselves of the Senate’s supermajority rules. Having brought down the country, made us despised around the world, let insurance companies and drug companies keep a hammerlock on health care, produced a gigantic deficit, and then—to boot—brought down the world economy and produced high unemployment, these know-nothings are hostage to a party base that believes, resolutely believes, that effective government = socialism = Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Che. (Glenn Beck made this case in an astounding propaganda film on Fox News Jan. 22, “Revolutionary Holocaust.” If you think I’m making this up, check it out here.)

Obama’s populist turn is overdue. How convincing will it be?

Todd Gitlin is on Dissent’s editorial board and is a professor at Columbia’s Journalism School.

Obama: One Year In, Todd Gitlin

Obama's First Year: It Could Have Been Worse

Obama's First Year: It Could Have Been Worse

Michael Walzer

AFTER OUTRAGE, disappointment is probably the easiest emotion of the left. I am always disappointed before the fact, so as not to be too disappointed afterwards. Right now, though, I am resisting disappointment. Granted, Obama’s first year has not seen a radical transformation of American society—not even the transformation that Roosevelt wrought in his first one hundred days. But there is a reason for that. Roosevelt came into office after three years of severe depression and frighteningly high unemployment. The country was ready for radical experiments. Obama came into office after only a few months of recession, and the country wasn’t ready for much more than he has done.

He brought with him a group of economic advisors and policy-makers who were committed to the restoration of the status quo ante—not to any radical reconstruction of the economic order. Had they been social democrats, rather than conventional liberals, they might have recognized the urgency of job creation and invested more heavily in it. But any more significant economic reconstruction was not a felt need in the country; there had been no political preparation for it; there was no movement mobilizing support for it and nothing like agreement on its necessity in Congress, not even among Democrats. The mere fact that we, on the left, wanted reconstruction is no reason to be disappointed that it didn’t happen. We are not entitled to get what we want, and we shouldn’t expect to get what we want until we convince a majority of our fellow citizens that they should want it too. And that we plainly haven’t done.

Popular anger against the bankers might still force a stronger reform of the financial system than Obama’s advisors originally endorsed. That would be a good thing. But I am not disappointed that Obama has refused to summon up and then exploit a wave of populist fury. Populist politics is always more available to the right than to the left, and the anger it arouses tends to float freely from bankers to Jews to immigrants to “communists”—to all the standard objects of resentment. Our politics is different. We need to make the case for structural reform, build public support for it, and strengthen the intermediate associations—like unions and consumer groups—that can educate and mobilize their members.

A lot more of that sort of work has been done to reform health care than to reform the banking system, but not enough, not nearly enough, to enable Obama to avoid the compromises that have been forced upon him—and the further compromises that will be forced upon him after the debacle in Massachusetts. For a while it looked as if we were going to get a piece of legislation that writers like Paul Krugman and Paul Starr described as a great achievement. That may be unachievable now, but even then it wasn’t quite the achievement that we dreamed about. We have been told: “In dreams begin responsibilities.” So where are the responsible agents of a real reform? Obama’s election did nothing to change the fecklessness of Democrats in the House and Senate. The left needs other agents—and so does Obama.

Many Americans are going to be better off because of Obama’s first year than they might have been. The recession didn’t turn into a depression; unemployment stopped at 10 percent (though it’s actually higher and in any case, much too high); some, not enough, foreclosures were prevented; some, not enough, small businesses got loans they wouldn’t have gotten; family savings were saved and pension funds stabilized. And it may still happen that in a few years (which is too long) many more (but not all) Americans will have access to decent health care, paid for—one way or another—by the federal government. The costs will continue to rise; the insurance companies will have too much power, but…

It could have been worse.

Michael Walzer is Dissent’s co-editor. He and Nicolaus Mills edited the Dissent-Penn Press book, Getting Out: Historical Perspectives on Leaving Iraq.

Obama: One Year In, Michael Walzer

Published on Wednesday, February 24, 2010 by CommonDreams.org

Doctors' Group: Obama Plan Leaves Millions Uninsured, Boosts Private Insurers

by Physicians for National Health Program

WASHINGTON - President Obama's health care proposal, preserving as it does a central role for the for-profit, private health insurance industry, is incapable of achieving the kind of universal, comprehensive and affordable reform the country needs, a spokesman for a national doctors' group said Wednesday.

"Regrettably, the president's proposal is built on some of the worst aspects of the Senate bill," said Dr. Quentin Young, national coordinator of Physicians for a National Health Program, an organization of 17,000 doctors who support single-payer, Medicare-for-All approach to reform. Young's statement comes on the eve of the president's bipartisan summit in Washington.

"For example, the president's proposal would ship hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to the private health insurance industry in the form of subsidies," Young said. "And to help finance this, it would impose a new tax on health benefits of workers, especially those in high-cost states.

"Its individual mandate would force millions of middle-income uninsured Americans to buy insurers' skimpy products - insurance policies full of gaps like ever-rising co-pays, deductibles and premiums. Such policies already leave middle-class American families vulnerable to economic hardship and medical bankruptcy in the event of a serious illness like cancer," continued Young, citing a recent study.

"Even so, at least 23 million people would remain uninsured," he said. "We know that being uninsured raises your chance of dying by about 40 percent," he continued, citing another recent study. "That translates into about 23,000 unnecessary deaths each year. As physicians, we find this completely unacceptable."

"In short," Young said, "this proposal is an insurance company bonanza, not good, evidence-based health reform. The president would do better by abandoning the insurance and drug companies and instead taking up the single-payer approach." His group has estimated that such an approach could save hundreds of billions of dollars annually by simplifying health administration.

"By building on and improving the already popular Medicare program, we could put our patients' interests first," he said. "Were President Obama to do so, he would meet with strong public support, including from the medical community."

Although the physicians' group requested an invitation to Thursday's summit at Blair House, no reply from the White House has been forthcoming, Young said. Similarly, requests from Reps. Dennis Kucinich of Ohio, Anthony Weiner of New York and Peter Welch of Vermont president that single-payer advocates be included in the meeting have apparently gone unanswered.

Outside the Blair House on Thursday, a grassroots "Sidewalk Summit for Medicare for All" will underscore popular support for the measure.

What Ever Happened to Candidate Obama?

Subject to Debate

By Katha Pollitt

How disappointed are the Obama warriors of 2008? "May your love for me not fade as quickly as your love for Obama," read one pale pink e-card making the rounds on Valentine's Day. Obama himself addressed the topic of a one-term presidency in a recent interview with Diane Sawyer, albeit in a noble, idealistic, theoretical way ("I'd rather be a really good one-term president than a mediocre two-term president"). Well, OK, who wouldn't rather be really good for four years than mediocre for eight; but how many really good one-term presidents have there been? (Only one--James K. Polk--according to a New York Times op-ed by Robert W. Merry, publisher of Stratfor and author of a biography of, well, James K. Polk.)

I'm still glad I supported Obama over Hillary Clinton. If Hillary had won the election, every single day would be a festival of misogyny. We would hear constantly about her voice, her laugh, her wrinkles, her marriage and what a heartless, evil bitch she is for doing something--whatever!--men have done since the Stone Age. Each week would bring its quotient of pieces by fancy women writers explaining why they were right not to have liked her in the first place. Liberal pundits would blame her for discouraging the armies of hope and change, for bringing back the same-old same-old cronies and advisers, for letting healthcare reform get bogged down in inside deals, for failing to get out of Iraq and Afghanistan--which would be attributed to her being a woman and needing to show toughness--for cozying up to Wall Street, deferring to the Republicans and ignoring the cries of the people. In other words, for doing pretty much what Obama is doing. This way I get to think, Whew, at least you can't blame this on a woman.

I'm not even sure how much of it you can blame on Obama. We've had ample evidence of how little power he has over the Democratic barons of the Senate--so little that he had to bribe Ben Nelson and Mary Landrieu with great big haunches of pork to get their votes on a healthcare bill that would benefit millions of their constituents. He is trying to bring some of the Guantánamo prisoners to trial on the US mainland, and Democrats like Jim Webb have sold him out. The Republicans have made clear their intention to obstruct his every move, and thanks to antidemocratic customs like the filibuster and the Senate hold, they've done a pretty good job so far. These are basic features of the landscape.

But let's not go overboard. The real-world constraints on what Obama can do are considerable. (Thank you, founding fathers, for setting up the Senate so that white, rural, conservative states with the population of Staten Island get the same two senators each as multiethnic urban powerhouses like California and New York. That little gift to the slave states of 1788 continues its antidemocratic work today.) But he is, after all, the president. He can propose, he can set forth an agenda, he can demand. He can ask for more than he knows he can get, he can push the boundaries. He doesn't have to do the Republicans' work for them--by asking for a smaller stimulus than necessary, by having the bulk of healthcare reform not kick in until 2014 to keep costs down, by praising obscenely rich bankers as "very savvy businessmen" to a nation with a 9.7 percent official unemployment rate. It's as if the Blue Dogs have gotten into his head, and instead of thinking how to push the possibilities to the max, he's thinking how he can placate his opponents in advance. Right now, the story of healthcare reform suggests that this is not possible--it simply enables a fresh set of even more egregious demands.

It's true that Obama was elected with the votes of many independents and some Republicans, and he has to respect that or end up building houses with Jimmy Carter. Lots of people were inspired by his promise to transcend party differences and take what was best from both Democrats and Republicans--I never understood it, because from my perspective Republicans have nothing to offer; but he did say it, and people took it seriously. A year later, though, those independents are leaving his side in droves, and with the possible exception of ordinary people of color, the base--prochoice women, labor, civil rights activists, opponents of war, progressives, leftists, civil libertarians--is demoralized. His poll numbers may be above 50 percent (although as I write a CNN poll shows a majority opposing a second term). But passable polls don't measure enthusiasm, and enthusiasm is what gets people to write checks they can't really afford, give up their vacations to knock on doors, spend their evenings phone-banking and push their friends to vote. It's easy to dismiss progressives as insignificant and dreamy or, as Rahm Emanuel put it, "fucking retarded." But Obama won't get re-elected without them. They are the troops.

During the campaign Obama was often attacked as being all airy speeches and noble rhetoric. Maybe he took that criticism too much to heart and made the mistake of trying to rack up accomplishments quickly through wonkery and compromise and deal-making, the normal things politicians do--only unfortunately the Republicans aren't interested in governing, and the Blue Dogs are mostly interested in themselves. We'll never know what would have happened if he'd continued to call on the better angels of our nature--if, for example, he'd presented healthcare reform as social solidarity, if he'd made people really feel the suffering of others and called upon them to right this terrible wrong. Maybe people--including progressives--wouldn't have been so easily discouraged and disillusioned by the inevitable complications and imperfections of the plan itself.

What is the point of Obama being conciliatory and careful if his opponents are reckless and don't want to conciliate? Why not use this awful moment when so many are losing their jobs and houses, and states are cutting services to the bone, to remind people why they voted for him?

About Katha Pollitt

Katha Pollitt's writing has appeared in many publications, including The New Yorker, The London Review of Books, the Washington Post and the New York Times. Her new book of poems, The Mind-Body Problem, has just been published by Random House. Her previous books include Learning to Drive: and Other Life Stories (Random House), a collection of personal essays. more...

Slate


How to fix health policy.

A Decoy Gambit? How badly does Obama want to impose pricing limits on health insurers?

By Timothy NoahPosted Monday, Feb. 22, 2010, at 6:25 PM ET

Click here for a guide to following the health care reform story online.

Barack Obama

"Watch out for people who lure you away from the real issue with the Decoy Gambit," warns Roger Dawson, author of Secrets of Power Negotiating. The decoy gambit is a negotiating tactic in which Party A introduces a demand he doesn't really care about. If all goes well, Party B will make a concession to persuade Party A to drop his insincere demand. Dawson claims the decoy gambit is unethical (though he admits he used it once to lower a hotel bill). I say all's fair in politics.

Allow me to explain. On Feb. 22, President Obama introduced a White House proposal on health care reform, crafted from the bills that already passed the House and Senate. The proposal adds some minor features of the House bill to the Senate bill, none of them very surprising to people who followed the House-Senate negotiations that occurred before Republican Scott Brown's election to Sen. Ted Kennedy's Massachusetts seat blew them all to hell. For example, the White House plan makes subsidies to people who purchase nongroup health insurance a tad more generous to people at lower incomes than the Senate provided for. It also adopts a few Republican proposals, none of them of any great moment, aimed mostly at battling fraud in Medicare and Medicaid. And it further scales back the ill-advised tax on high-value "Cadillac" health plans by raising the threshold (which started at $23,000, then rose to $24,000) to $27,500 and by putting off its implementation (for everyone, not just union members) to 2018. To take up the revenue slack, the White House builds on the Senate bill's 0.9 percent Medicare surtax on family incomes above $250,000 by adding, as foretold, a surtax on investment income for families in that same income group. Also unsurprising is what the White House bill doesn't include. It contains no public option, and it doesn't address how health insurers receiving government subsidies may treat abortion. The failure to resolve this last question, which has lately received scant attention, poses the biggest obstacle to health reform's passage.

So far, absolutely nothing to cause Republicans to cry, "I was blind, but now I see." This is essentially the same bill the GOP has opposed all along.

But the White House also added something new. Something bold and somewhat surprising. It added a proposal that would give the federal government veto power over insurance premium hikes. I suspect this provision is a decoy—something the White House added so it could be bargained away later.

Under the Obama proposal (which was modeled on an amendment by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D.-Calif., that never got a floor vote) the Health and Human Services department would create a new Health Insurance Rate Authority to review health insurance premium increases and determine whether they're fair. Thirty-three states currently perform this task. The Obama proposal would enable such review in the remaining 17 states and provide backup to all 50.

The proposal builds on provisions in both the House bill (Title I, Section 104) and the Senate's (Title One, Section 1003) empowering HHS to conduct an annual review of excessive rate increases. The purpose of these, however, is mere disclosure; HHS would post evidence of price-gouging online. It would then be up to state insurance commissioners to use the data to recommend to the newly created health insurance exchanges that the worst offenders not be allowed to participate. The Obama proposal, by contrast, would empower HHS itself to scale back proposed premium hikes or demand rebates for hikes that have already taken effect. Although this does not constitute across-the-board price controls (each premium increase would be considered on its own merits), it is a form of price control, something conservatives have always hated and that liberals have long shied away from at the national level. Administering it could prove a nightmare.

The central issue, of course, is defining "excessive." Are health insurers gouging prices now? The evidence is mixed. A report issued earlier this month by Health Care for America Now!, a labor-backed pro-reform coalition, showed that the nation's five largest for-profit health insurers (WellPoint, UnitedHealth, Humana, Cigna, and Aetna) saw a combined profit increase last year of 56 percent, yet provided private coverage to 2.7 million fewer people than they had the year before. But the profits weren't across the board; Aetna saw an 8 percent decline. The huge combined increase was driven mostly by Cigna, whose 356 percent increase appears to be unrelated to its core health insurance business. As for declining private coverage: Health insurers argue (not implausibly) that it's largely driven by the tendency of young, healthy people to drop nongroup health insurance in tough economic times.

Profits in the health insurance business aren't as great as many suppose. In a Sept. 25 online column for the New York Times ("How Much Money Do Insurance Companies Make? A Primer"), Princeton economist Uwe Reinhardt calculated the profit margin for WellPoint, parent company to Anthem Blue Cross (which earlier this month caught hell from the Obama administration for raising California premiums by up to 39 percent). In 2008, Reinhardt wrote, WellPoint's profit margin was 4.07 percent. In 2007 it was 5.47 percent. In 2006 it was 5.42 percent. "Relative to other industries," Reinhardt concluded, "these are not particularly high numbers." None of the big five ranks among the United States' 10 most profitable insurance companies, as ranked in 2009 by Fortune; on Fortune's list of the 53 most profitable industry sectors, health insurance ranks 35^th. One expects more from an industry that enjoys so ludicrous a degree of market concentration. A 2007 study by the American Medical Association found that fully 64 percent of all metropolitan statistical areas had at least one insurer that had a market share of at least 50 percent.

The Obama administration is aware of all this, but bashing insurance companies when premiums are rising sky-high is can't-lose politics, especially considering that health insurance is the one major health-industry sector that for the past six months has actively opposed the health reform bill. It's a nice way to paper over the uncomfortable reality that the health reform bills that cleared the House and the Senate do almost nothing to control medical inflation. And it should help shore up Obama's Democratic base, which loves to imagine that health insurance profits are grotesquely huge. That's why they're so evil! Liberals seldom consider that the reason health insurers are so stingy and so untrustworthy is not that they're hugely profitable but that they aren't hugely profitable. Indeed, it's far from clear that the economic model of private for-profit health insurance is viable when we demand that health insurers behave decently. Conservatives would say that's an argument to ease up on regulation. I say it's an argument not to weep too many tears for an industry that may be going the way of the dodo. If the market can't provide decent health insurance, the government (or heavily regulated nonprofits) certainly can. But I don't think making the federal government the referee on premium increases is an especially good way to regulate private health insurance. Neither, I suspect, does President Obama.

Threatening to do so, however, is a great way to drive Republicans crazy. Should they demand he retreat, Obama can do so and then use his bully pulpit to point out that his is the only side in this negotiation willing to make any concessions. I'm not convinced it will get a health reform bill passed. Threatening to create a government-insurance "public option" program was, at least in the minds of some Democrats, similarly a decoy (though the favored term was "bargaining chip"). Yet jettisoning it didn't win any GOP votes. But the decoy gambit isn't a bad way to put an advantageous spin on health reform's demise. I wish I thought the White House expects to achieve anything more than that.

So much for reform: Immigration Reform Advocates Losing Patience with Obama

Published on Monday, February 22, 2010 by New American Media

Immigration Reform Advocates Losing Patience with Obama

by Marcelo Ballvé

Subhash Kateel thinks impatience with President Obama's immigration agenda has begun to boil over. An immigrant advocate in Florida, Kateel says there is a potent mix of frustration and disappointment percolating through immigrant communities nationwide.

President Obama promised sweeping changes to the immigration system before taking office and raised immigrants' hopes, says Kateel. Instead of delivering, the administration has maintained the status quo: high-handed enforcement tactics that separate families and funnel immigrants into substandard immigration courts and detention centers.

"Yeah, things are changing," says Kateel, who works for the Miami-based Florida Immigrant Rights Coalition. "They're getting worse. That's what we hear on the ground."

Kateel is one among many immigrant advocates nationwide who sees a need to reignite the immigrant rights battle with more imaginative and hard-hitting tactics.

Arrests of immigrants - mostly for petty crimes - have increased under Obama, advocates point out. Department of Homeland security budgeting for immigration enforcement, detention and deportation has continued ballooning.

The advocates would like to hold the White House accountable for its broken promises. Plans are underway to attract tens of thousands of activists to Washington, D.C. on March 21 to demand reform.

But besides relying on timeworn tactics like street protests and lobbying lawmakers, the immigrant rights advocates also have turned to more imaginative and radical approaches.

One is the shaming of specific public figures that are perceived as enablers of anti-immigrant activity and sentiment.

Late last year, CNN anchor Lou Dobbs resigned after he was targeted in a high-profile media campaign, "Basta Dobbs," that painted him as a megaphone for distorted information on immigration.

Last month, over 10,000 people turned out in Phoenix to rally against local Sheriff Joe Arpaio who, thanks to a contract with the federal government, has transformed his office into a de-facto hard-line arm of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

On the same day, Jan. 16, smaller rallies were held nationwide to coincide with the anti-Arpaio protest.

Faith leaders, young people and more recent immigrants are playing prominent roles in organizing protests like the Phoenix rally.

The Phoenix rally was successful in part thanks to a high level of engagement from young people, says Shuya Ohno, spokesman for the Reform Immigration for American campaign in Washington, D.C.

"I would say youth are leading the way right now," agrees Katherine Gorell, communications director for the Florida Immigrant Rights Coalition.

Students have recently innovated with their own original protest concepts. Along with four other students from South Florida, 23-year-old Felipe Matos is walking 1,500 miles from Miami to Washington, D.C., to promote in-state tuition at public colleges for undocumented immigrants.

"The government hasn't done anything for us, so we need to do something for ourselves," says Matos.

Like two of the other walkers Matos is an accomplished student at Miami Dade College, but is blocked from financial aid and other forms of support due to his lack of papers.

Presente.org, an online Latino organizing group that also helped organize "Basta Dobbs," is one of the backers of the students' protest, dubbed the "Trail of Dreams."

In New York, a five-day road trip this week dubbed "Road Trip for our Future" took 10 immigration activists, many of them first- and second-generation immigrants, on an itinerary that includes farm towns, rust-belt cities, and suburban communities.

The activists held rallies outside lawmakers' offices and met with local activist groups including, in tiny Pittsford, N.Y.,-"The Raging Grannies," a troupe of elderly ladies who sang a ditty in favor of immigration reform.

One of the caravanning activists, Gabriela Villareal, is also advocacy policy director for the New York Immigration Coalition. She expressed peoples' frustration with the immigration system with a personal anecdote. Under current law, it would take 22 years for her to lawfully bring her adult brother from the Philippines to live with her in the United States.

Hunger strikes - that age-old tool of last resort in political protests - have lately become more common in immigrant rights organizing.

Last year, solitary confinement had to be used to break apart hunger strikes at an immigrant detention facility in Basile, LA. And at the beginning of this year Florida activists grouped as "Fast for our Families" went on a fast to protest inflexible deportation policies that the fasters said needlessly separate immigrant families.

The Florida group was joined on Jan. 18 by some 70 fasters at the Port Isabel Detention Center in Bayview, Texas.

Some of the new immigration activism is taking place in states and localities that would hardly be expected to be hotbeds of immigrant rights agitation.

Alma Díaz, a 28-year-old bartender and mother of a three-year-old daughter, helped organize an unexpectedly large pro-immigrant rally in Cincinnati last month in collaboration with workers' and faith-based groups.

"Lately, this year, and the final months of last year I've seen many Latinos ... including many who can't yet speak English, who are informing themselves, and are organizing and making themselves heard on immigration," says Díaz.

In Utah, Colombian-American Isabel Rojas has begun urging leaders and rank-and-file members of the Mormon Church - of which she is also a member - to take a more explicit stance in favor of immigrants.

The Mormon Church or Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS church for short) has spoken out in favor of compassionate treatment of immigrants, but has stopped short of condemning Utah immigration legislation that critics saw as too harsh.

Rojas hopes that as its immigrant membership continues to swell the LDS Church will join the Catholic Church and some evangelical and protestant denominations in advocating openly for immigrant rights.

But in the meantime, Utah's get-tough 2009 immigration bill had one favorable consequence for her work with Comunidades Unidas, a grassroots immigrant advocacy group.

"That scare was what got people looking again at re-energizing and reorganizing," Rojas says.

© 2010 New American Media

Obama's Big Bang goes bust

POLITICO

Obama's Big Bang could go bust

By MIKE ALLEN & JIM VANDEHEI

Barack Obama’s Big Bang is beginning to backfire, as his plans for rapid, once-in-a-generation overhauls of energy, financial regulation and health care are running into stiff resistance, both in Washington and around the country.

The Obama theory was simple, though always freighted with risk: Use a season of economic anxiety to enact sweeping changes the public likely wouldn’t stomach in ordinary times. But the abrupt swing in the public’s mood, from optimism about Obama’s possibility to concern he may be overreaching, has thrown the White House off its strategy and forced the president to curtail his ambitions.

Some Democrats point to a decision in June as the first vivid sign of trouble for Obama. These Democrats say the White House, in retrospect, made a grievous mistake by muscling conservative Democrats in swing districts to vote for a cap-and-trade energy bill that was very unpopular among their constituents.

Many of those members were pounded back home because Democrats passed a bill Republicans successfully portrayed as a big tax increase on consumers. The result: many conservative Democrats were gun-shy about taking any more risky votes — or going out on a limb on health care.

The other result: The prospects for winning final passage of a cap-and-trade bill this year are greatly diminished. And, while most Democrats still predict a health care bill will pass this year, it is likely to be a shadow of what Obama once had planned.

“The majority-makers are the freshman and sophomores from conservative districts where there’s this narrative building about giveaways, bailouts and too much change at once,” said a top House Democratic strategist, who requested anonymity to discuss internal politics candidly. “There’s this big snowball building in those districts. That’s why those folks are so scared."

David Axelrod, Obama’s political architect, said it was “very clear early in the transition” that Obama would have to attack a number of festering issues simultaneously.

“The times demanded it," he said in an interview. "We didn’t have the luxury of taking things sequentially, year after year, and hoping we got there. That’s the reason that all these major issues had been deferred for decades: Change is hard.”

Axelrod said the president is “looking forward to an active fall” when he returns from next week’s vacation on Martha’s Vineyard, and is not as worried about the outlook as the denizens of Washington, where “every day is election day.”

But the “Big Bang” theory of governance, as some White House insiders called it, is not without risk and consequences.

By doing so much, so fast, Obama gave Republicans the chance to define large swaths of the debate. Conservatives successfully portrayed the stimulus bill as being full of pork for Democrats. Then Obama lost control of the health care debate by letting Republicans get away with their bogus claims about “death panels.” The GOP also has successfully raised concerns that the Obama plan is a big-government takeover of health care — and much of Middle America bought the idea, according to polls.

By doing so much, so fast, Obama never sufficiently educated the public on the logic behind his policies. He spent little time explaining the biggest bailouts in U.S. history, which he inherited but supported and expanded. And then he lost crucial support on the left by not following up quickly with new and stricter rules for Wall Street. On Friday, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman echoed a concern widely shared among leading liberals. “I don’t know if administration officials realize just how much damage they’ve done themselves with their kid-gloves treatment of the financial industry, just how badly the spectacle of government supported institutions paying giant bonuses is playing.”

By doing so much so fast, Obama jammed the circuits on Capitol Hill. Congress has a hard time doing even one big thing well at a time. Congress is good at passing giveaways and tax cuts, but has not enacted a transformative piece of social legislation since President Bill Clinton’s welfare reform of 1996. “There’s a reason things up here were built to go slowly,” said another Democratic aide.

By doing so doing so much, so fast, he has left voters — especially independents — worried that he got an overblown sense of his mandates and is doing, well, too much too fast. A Washington Post-ABC News poll published Friday found that independents’ confidence in Obama’s ability to make the right decisions had dropped 20 points since the Inauguration, from 61 percent to 41 percent.

Axelrod and others argue Obama had no choice but to tackle all of these issues at once. That might be true for a stimulus bill and the bank and auto bailouts — but that case is harder to make for energy and health care, which have been the focus of intense debate for decades past and probably will for decades to come.

Go-big-or-go-home isn't the only theory of the case that a new president can adopt. The most promising alternative is to build public support over time by showing competence and success, then using that to leverage bigger things.

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. Some White House officials said they are skeptical of moving controversial bills in an election year, when lawmakers are often more timid.

White House officials say they never seriously considered a more incremental approach to the year, though they did privately discuss trying to get regulation of the financial sector done right after the stimulus bill. There was too much disagreement among Democrats at the time over how far to go with regulation to proceed.

If the current strategy fails, the same person who got much of the credit for the crisp first 100 days will get some of the blame: White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel. It was Emanuel who has strongly advocated the big-bang approach, declaring during the transition: “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. Now, what I mean by that, it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do.”

The confidence of Obama’s aides was bolstered by their fresh memory that a similar approach had worked very effectively for then-President George W Bush after the Sept. 11 attacks. With the public on edge, Bush was able to enact restrictive policies under the banner of protecting American soil, and build an entire new department of government that voters otherwise might have opposed. The economic meltdown would be Obama’s Sept. 11 — the predicate for sweeping legislation that he wanted to enact anyway.

Just past halftime in his first year, the president has won passage of a long list of bills that the White House points to as proof of their approach. In addition to the stimulus, Obama signed major bills on tobacco, pay equity, children’s health insurance, national service and the mortgage rescue.

If he gets health care and either energy or regulation this year, it would be hard to argue the big-bang plan wasn’t a success.

Former Rep. Lee Hamilton (D-Ind.), now president and director of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, cautions that any verdict on Obama would be “kind of like judging a major surgical operation in the middle of the operation.”

With Obama reaching the defining season of his freshman year, Hamilton said the current agenda reminds him of the scale of the Great Society programs Congress was tackling when he came to Congress in 1965. “This president thinks big but I also think he acts pragmatically,” Hamilton said. “So many things in a congressional session come together at the last few hours, the last few weeks.”

But sometimes they just come undone.

Zachary Abrahamson contributed to this report.

Obama Gestures Hypnotically Changing Change to Reform

POLITICO

President Obama's strategy: Replace change with reform

By MIKE ALLEN

Obama gestures hypnotically!

President Barack Obama, after weeks of private talks, is putting the finishing touches on a new election-year strategy that replaces sweeping "change" with incremental reform, according to senior White House officials.

“Reform is the new change,” a senior aide told POLITICO.

The revamped 2010 plan focuses extensively on new reform efforts, starting with a “competitiveness” push, a call for tighter campaign finance laws and renewed attention to Obama’s open-government agenda.

The strategy involves heavy use of presidential statements and Obama's White House platform to position him as an agent of popular change, with less reliance on a complicated legislative agenda. It represents a downsizing from the heady days just a year ago when he hoped to rack up legislative achievements of a scope not seen since the Great Society triumphs of President Lyndon Johnson.

It acknowledges implicitly something Obama aides make explicit in background conversations: The president is unlikely to pass the most expansive parts of his agenda this year and is too tied in public perceptions to a messy legislative process and unpopular congressional leaders.

Presidential aides say they recognize that there’s not enough time before the 2010 elections to transform the toxic political environment that has given Republicans a real, albeit remote, chance of winning control of the House or Senate. Instead, the White House is going to try to mitigate the damage by reminding voters, especially independents, of the reasons they voted so eagerly for Obama in 2008.

The strategy, detailed here for the first time, is the culmination of weeks of internal deliberations over how to reposition Obama and congressional Democrats for the midterm congressional elections in November.

A close adviser said Obama plans to increase his travel in the country, including minicampaigns built around “a series of small but highly visible policy debates that clearly put the Democrats on the side of middle-class families, with lobbies for special interests on the other side.” Two likely targets: student-loan servicing organizations and banks.

A top administration official said that “the biggest piece of reform” will be supporting congressional efforts to limit the impact of the Citizens United Supreme Court ruling that opened campaigns to huge independent spending by corporations and unions. “Americans really turned against this opinion, the official said. “And so the biggest reform is to ensure that our politics and our campaigns are not controlled by special interests. Getting legislation that deals with the Supreme Court decision on the floor and debated — and hopefully passed — is very important.”

Senior Capitol Hill aides tell POLITICO that both the House and the Senate plan to take up such measures in coming weeks. Lawmakers and the White House were emboldened by a Washington Post-ABC News poll finding 80 percent or respondents opposed to the court decision. A top Senate Democratic official said Democrats are planning to take up legislation in response to the Citizens United ruling by Easter in order to have something on the books before the 2010 elections.

The administration official said that another key theme in coming days, in addition to reform, will be “how to make America competitive, because our competitors are not playing for second place.”

“That’s the banner,” the official said. “Whether it’s education, whether it’s jobs, whether it’s research and development, whether it’s nuclear power: It’s all about America’s competitiveness.”

The emphasis on competitiveness addresses voter feelings that government is out of control, and underscores that Obama is a capitalist, using the private sector to boost jobs. “The White House recognizes a growing anxiety about America’s ability to compete with China and India over the long run if we don’t address problems in education, innovation, energy — all areas where Republican obstruction is preventing progress,” a White House official said.

Aides say Obama will stress that theme at all three of his major public events this week: On Monday, he speaks to the nation’s governors at the White House. On Wednesday, he travels to the St. Regis Hotel to address the CEOs who make up Business Roundtable. And on Thursday, he holds his bipartisan health-care summit at Blair House.

Finally, in an effort to reclaim the “change” mantle even though he now runs the government, Obama plans to emphasize his “transparency” agenda — such measures as releasing White House visitor logs; posting specific projects funded by the stimulus bill; and signing an Open Government Directive requiring federal agencies to achieve milestones in transparency, participation and collaboration. “It gives the American people a very important sense that they have influence and control, and access to information,” the administration official said.

Steve Hildebrand, deputy manager of Obama’s presidential campaign and now a political consultant specializing in grass-roots strategy, has been reminding the White House that the politics of reform are more attractive than ever after the high court’s Citizens United decision, which found that independent corporate spending in elections constituted free speech and therefore could not be banned by the government.

Hildebrand has been bolstering his case with research from a joint project by Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg and Mark McKinnon, a top adviser to former President George W. Bush. “Voters, particularly independents,” the pollsters concluded, “strongly embrace the Fair Elections Now Act, a system that allows candidates who eschew contributions over $100 to receive public matching funds for money they raise from individuals in their own state. Voters support the Fair Elections Now Act by a two-to-one margin.”

Hildebrand, who is working as a consultant to Public Campaign Action Fund and Common Cause to help pass serious campaign finance reform, contends that in a close race this fall, the candidate identified as the reformer will win “hands down.”

“A reformer can be a Republican or a Democrat — it’s not going to matter,” Hildebrand said. “Reform is going to trump partisanship, in my opinion. If somebody tries to campaign on change this fall, it’ll fall short unless that change is around some real serious reform.”

Published on Monday, February 22, 2010 by Huffington Post

Obama Health Care Plan Drops Public Option

by Ryan Grim

Despite the recent surge of support in the Senate for a government-run health insurance option, President Obama chose not to include one of the most popular elements of reform in the plan he is presenting to a bipartisan group of lawmakers Thursday.

US President Barack Obama speaks at a meeting with state governors in the State Dining Room of the White House in Washington, February 22, 2010. Despite the recent surge of support in the Senate for a government-run health insurance option, Obama chose not to include one of the most popular elements of reform in the plan he is presenting to a bipartisan group of lawmakers Thursday. (REUTERS/Jason Reed)

The Obama plan explicitly bridges the differences between Senate and House legislation on issues both large and small, but on the public option -- which is included in the House bill, but not in the Senate's -- Obama is entirely silent.

Last week, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius told MSNBC's Rachel Maddow that Obama would "absolutely" fight for a public option if Senate leadership decided to go for it. "[I]f it's part of the decision of leadership to move forward, absolutely," Sebelius said. "The president said from the outset he thought that was a great way to provide cost reduction and competition moving forward, but if that is not the choice of the majority moving forward, I think there are other ways to get there."

Since then, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said he would work with his colleagues to find the votes needed for it; Sen. Charles Schumer (N.Y.), the third ranking Democrat, pushed for it to be included; and Sen. Bob Menendez (N.J.), chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, joined in the call as well.

But neither that nor the public option's consistently strong appeal in public-opinion polls was enough to persuade Obama to get behind it.

Indeed, after months of watching Obama say generally that he supports the public option while doing little to see it implemented into law, backers of the idea were unsurprised it was left out of his final offer.

"We didn't expect one," said Darcy Burner, head of the Progressive Caucus Policy Foundation.

Last week's surge had fired up a demoralized Democratic base, giving the health care reform effort an extra push as Obama tried to drag it across the finish line. But if the final bill is to include a public option, leaders in Congress and outside organizations advocating on its behalf will need to do it without Obama. "Congress and the people of the United States will have to lead in truly taking on the insurance companies," Burner said.

Obama's decision not to push for the public option does not preclude it from being included. Indeed, any member of the Senate can introduce it as an amendment to a package moving through under the rules of reconciliation, a parliamentary process that precludes a filibuster.

UPDATE: 10:15 -- Jacob Hacker, the Yale professor credited with original idea of the public option, told HuffPost in an e-mail that he is glad that the president is pushing forward with reform. He said Congress should follow a path he calls "Pass, Pledge, and Promise," whereby it passes an amended health care reform bill and promises to include a public option at a later date, if it becomes impossible to do immediately. Hacker's response:

The President should be commended for moving the stalled debate forward. His blueprint improves a number of the weakest elements of the Senate bill, including the subsidies for middle-class Americans receiving coverage through the exchanges and the protections against high cost-sharing under these plans. Notably, he includes stronger consumer protections for so-called grandfathered plans--employment-based plans existing at the time the law takes effect (which would have been only weakly regulated under the Senate bill). He has also broken important new ground by proposing to create a way to review health insurers' egregious rate increases, a step whose urgency has been driven home by the Anthem rate hikes in California.

Even more important than any of these specifics is that the President is signaling he will engage fully in making reform happen and stand fully behind the members of Congress as they seek their own compromises. In this week's summit and the days that follow, the White House needs to stand strongly for the middle class and press for simple, understandable, effective, and popular steps.

For my part, I believe this strategic and policy advice recommends a path I call "Pass, Pledge, and Promise" (a variation on Senator Franken's "Pass and Pledge"): pass the Senate bill in the House, fix it with a pledged reconciliation bill, and promise to enact a public option -- now or, if now is impossible, in the near future. The beauty of the "promise" part is that a public option would be a big initiative on behalf of the middle class that would actually save the federal government serious money--at least $25 billion, and potentially much more than that, depending on how it is structured. Amid all the attacks on the public option, it has remained remarkably popular, and for a simple reason: It sends an unmistakable message that politicians are on the side of citizens rather than insurers.

UPDATE: 10:27 -- FireDogLake.com's Jane Hamsher tells HuffPost that including a proposal by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), which would regulate rises in insurance premiums, isn't serious because it would likely violate the "Byrd rule" -- in other words, it would be ruled out of order if it was introduced as an amendment to a bill under reconciliation, because it doesn't have a direct connection to the deficit.

The Senate, however, could vote to overrule the parliamentarian, putting Republicans on the spot. Broadly, said Hamsher, claims that Obama backs a public option ring hollow if he doesn't get behind it when it matters. "This morning, Dan Pfeifer said the President still 'supports' a public option. How can Obama possibly claim to 'support' something if he doesn't include it in his own plan?" she asked. "It's incredibly cynical to include the Feinstein Health Insurance Rate Authority in order to try and control spiraling costs, which is unlikely to survive the Byrd rule, and exclude the public option, which could be included and actually does achieve cost control. This game of pretending to do one thing while actually doing another continues to erode public confidence about the administration's true goals."

Adam Green of the Progressive Change Congressional Committee, which has been pushing hard for the public option, said that the PCCC, Credo Action and Democracy for America will be releasing a petition that tells Congress: "Americans want a good health care bill with a public option, even if it passes with only Democratic votes. We would rather have a good bill than a bipartisan one."

Polling shows that voters would rather have a strong bill than a bipartisan one.

PCCC/DFA/Credo are actually about to launch a petition to Congress that is a perfect quote

"The White House is asking Democrats in Congress to shoot themselves in the foot in the name of bipartisanship. Congress would be wise to smile nicely at the White House and then pass the public option through reconciliation and win re-election," said Green.

© 2010 Huffington Post

Obama Alienates Environmental Community

Published on Thursday, February 18, 2010 by the New York Times

Environmental Advocates Are Cooling on Obama

by John M. Broder

WASHINGTON - There has been no more reliable cheerleader for President Obama's energy and climate change policies than Daniel J. Weiss of the left-leaning Center for American Progress.

The Exelon Byron Nuclear Generating Stations in Byron, Illinois. Obama's recent enthusiasm for nuclear power, including his budget proposal to triple federal loan guarantees for new nuclear reactors to $54 billion, has angered millions of environmentalists who had supported his presidential campaign.

But Mr. Obama's recent enthusiasm for nuclear power, including his budget proposal to triple federal loan guarantees for new nuclear reactors to $54 billion, was too much for Mr. Weiss.

The president's embrace of nuclear power was disappointing, and the wrong way to go about winning Republican votes, he said, adding that Mr. Obama should not be endorsing such a costly and potentially catastrophic energy alternative "as bait just to get talks started with pro-nuke senators."

The early optimism of environmental advocates that the policies of former President George W. Bush would be quickly swept away and replaced by a bright green future under Mr. Obama is for many environmentalists giving way to resignation, and in some cases, anger.

Mr. Obama moved quickly in his first months in office, producing a landmark deal on automobile emissions, an Environmental Protection Agency finding that greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare, a virtual moratorium on oil drilling on public lands and House passage of a cap-and-trade bill.

Since then, in part because of the intense focus on the health care debate last year, action on environmental issues has slowed. The Senate has not yet begun debate on a comprehensive global warming bill, the Interior Department is writing new rules to open some public lands and waters to oil drilling and the E.P.A. is moving cautiously to apply the endangerment finding.

Environmental advocates largely remained silent late last year as Mr. Obama all but abandoned his quest for sweeping climate change legislation and began to reach out to Republicans to enact less ambitious clean energy measures.

But the grumbling of the greens has grown louder in recent weeks as Mr. Obama has embraced nuclear power, offshore oil drilling and "clean coal" as keystones of his energy policy. And some environmentalists have expressed concern that the president may be sacrificing too much to placate Republicans and the well-financed energy lobbies.

Erich Pica, president of Friends of the Earth, whose political arm endorsed Mr. Obama's candidacy for president, said that Mr. Obama's recent policy emphasis amounted to "unilateral disarmament."

"We were hopeful last year; he was saying all the right things," Mr. Pica said. "But now he has become a full-blown nuclear power proponent, a startling change over the last few months."

Mr. Obama said in his remarks on the nuclear project this week that he knew his policies were alienating some environmentalists.

"Now, there will be those that welcome this announcement, those who think it's been long overdue," Mr. Obama said of the new nuclear loan guarantee. "But there are also going to be those who strongly disagree with this announcement. The same has been true in other areas of our energy debate, from offshore drilling to putting a price on carbon pollution. But what I want to emphasize is this: Even when we have differences, we cannot allow those differences to prevent us from making progress."

Mr. Obama has long supported nuclear power, as a senator and as a candidate for president. Employees of the Exelon Corporation, the Chicago-based utility that is the largest operator of nuclear plants in the United States, have been among Mr. Obama's biggest campaign donors, giving more than $330,000 over his career, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

In response to criticism of some of its energy policies, the White House points to its clean energy investments, including $80 billion in stimulus spending on energy-related projects, and its continuing support for comprehensive climate and energy legislation. But critics in the green movement say they wish the president would play a more active role in the climate debate.

"I think we all had higher hopes," said Bill Snape, senior counsel for the Center for Biological Diversity. "We expected a lot in the first year, and everyone agrees they didn't quite live up to it. But there is recognition that he and the whole administration will get another stab at it."

Mr. Snape said his group was particularly disappointed that the administration did not designate the polar bear as endangered by global warming and that it could not push a climate change bill through Congress.

"You can't get anything right," he said, "unless you get the polar bear right."

Frances Beinecke, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council, one of the administration's most stalwart supporters up to now, also expressed disappointment in the president's new focus on nuclear power and his mention in the State of the Union address of "clean coal technologies."

Mr. Obama was referring to the prospect of capturing and storing carbon dioxide emissions from coal-fired power plants, an as-yet-unproven technology. He was sending a signal to members of Congress from states that are dependent on mining coal or that burn it for electricity that any legislation he supported would accommodate their concerns.

"N.R.D.C. knows there is no such thing as ‘clean coal,' " Ms. Beinecke wrote in a blog post after the State of the Union address. "Every single step in the coal power cycle is dirty, from the profoundly destructive mountaintop removal mining to the smokestack emissions, which are responsible for 24,000 deaths a year."

Eric Haxthausen, the United States climate policy director for the Nature Conservancy, has generally supported the administration's goals and actions on energy and environment, although he said they fell short of what was needed to address global warming.

He said that Mr. Obama's pledge at the United Nations conference in Copenhagen on climate change to reduce American emissions by 17 percent by 2020 compared with 2005 levels had raised the stakes. The United States government is now on record promising the world that it will take major steps to reduce greenhouse gas pollution, Mr. Haxthausen said.

"What's needed to give this process life is a binding agent," he said, "some force to bring these things together, and the White House has to be intimately involved. The reality is there's a bit of a bully pulpit role that's needed, and the question is, will the administration deliver."

© 2010 New York Times

Obama and his 'Savvy' Bankers are Parasites

Published on Tuesday, February 16, 2010 by The Guardian/UK

Obama and the 'Savvy' Bankers

In an interview, the US president described the Goldman Sachs CEO as 'savvy'. So how did he and his crew use their wisdom?

by Dean Baker

Last week, when President Obama was asked about the $9m dollar bonus for Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, he described Blankfein as a savvy businessman, adding that Americans don't begrudge people being rewarded for success. While the White House later qualified Obama's comment about Blankfein and his fellow bank executives, it's worth examining more closely some of the ways in which Blankfein and the Goldman gang were "savvy".

Perhaps the Goldman gang's best claim to savvy was in buying up hundreds of billions of dollars of mortgages and packaging them into mortgage backed securities, and more complex derivative instruments, and selling them all over the world. Blankfein and Goldman earned tens of billions of dollars on these deals. The great trick was that many of the loans put into these securities were issued by banks filling in phony information so that borrowers could get loans that they would not be able to repay. But this was not Goldman's concern. They made money on the packaging and the selling of the securities.

In fact, Goldman actually recognised that many of these loans would go bad. So they went to the insurance giant AIG and got them to issue credit default swaps against many of the securities it had created. In effect they were betting that their own securities were garbage. Now that is savvy. (It says something else about the highly paid executives at AIG.)

Goldman doesn't just confine its savvy to the US economy; it shares it with the rest of the world as well. According to the New York Times it worked closely with the Greek government over the last decade to help it conceal its budget deficit. The trick was to construct complex financial arrangements that appeared on the books as "swaps", even though they were in fact loans. Greece was adding billions of dollars to its debt, and thanks to the ingenuity of the Goldman crew, no one knew about it until now.

But Goldman's greatest triumph was to get the government to come to its rescue when the financial sector was melting down in the fall of 2008 as the housing bubble that they had helped to fuel began to collapse. The treasury secretary and former Goldman CEO Henry Paulson rushed to Congress and demanded $700bn for the banks, no questions asked. He dragged along Federal Reserve Board chairman Ben Bernanke for support, along with Timothy Geithner, then the important head of the New York Federal Reserve Bank and now President Obama's treasury secretary.

This triumvirate somehow managed to convince Congress that we would have a second Great Depression if it didn't cough up the money immediately with no conditions. At that point Goldman, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, and most of the other major banks were staring at bankruptcy. While this cascade of bank failures would have been bad news for the economy, there was no plausible scenario in which it would have led to a second Great Depression.

There was also no reason that Congress could not have put conditions on its money. For example, Congress could have dictated that as a condition of getting the money that bankers would get the same sort of paycheques as other workers, that they would get out of highly speculative activity, that the largest banks would be downsized and that the principle would be written down on bad mortgages. At that point, Congress could have told the bank honchos that they had to run around Wall Street naked with their underpants on their head. The bankers had no choice; their banks would crash and burn without government support.

But the savvy Mr Blankfein and the other bankers got the money no questions asked. In fact, Goldman even got the government to pick up the bankrupt AIG's debts. Thanks to the government's intervention, Goldman got paid every penny on its bets with AIG. This came to $13bn, enough money to pay for 4 million kid-years of healthcare under the Children's Health Insurance Program.

No one should doubt that Blankfein is a very savvy banker. Without his ingenuity Goldman Sachs would likely be out of business, its component divisions being auctioned off to the highest bidder. Instead it is making record profits and paying out record bonuses.

But unlike the successful ballplayers to whom President Obama compared Blankfein, Goldman's success is inherently parasitic. It comes at the expense of taxpayers and the productive economy. President Obama must decide whether he stands with the Wall Street banks or whether he stands with the workers and businesses who actually produce wealth.

© Guardian News and Media Limited 2010

Dean Baker is the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR). He is the author of The Conservative Nanny State: How the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer ( www.conservativenannystate.org) and the more recently published Plunder and Blunder: The Rise and Fall of The Bubble Economy. He also has a blog, "Beat the Press," where he discusses the media's coverage of economic issues. You can find it at the American Prospect's web site.