Posted by
Bill Crawford on Friday, September 04, 2009 2:32:32 PM
Health care reform is on the guillotine, and everybody is waiting for Obama to make a last minute deal to stave off execution.
The supporters of reform are clearly not the look-in-the-mirror types, so the blame game is picking up speed.
Here's the funny part: it's the Republican's fault. How's that? I've been trying to figure that one out.
This is what Obama entered office with:
The highest popular vote of any Dem Presidential candidate since LBJ.
A House that took majority in 2006 and increased it last year.
A Senate that did the same as the House, increasing to virtually veto-proof in mid year.
A national press corps that votes Democrat by a factor of 8 to 1.
Major newsweeklies that have his face on the cover more than once a month, Time's "Man of the Year" for 2008.
Support of the major unions.
Support of much of academia and the education industry.
Support from the TV news networks that often goes way, way past tacit.
The Republicans have Fox News, a retired Alaska Governor, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck.
Yeah, that's about even.
Let's get this straight. The Democrats would ram this through at this point with a party line vote, if they had it. They don't.
They don't in part because health care is a huge thing in our economy, and many people want to think it through before we pass it off to the feds in a damned hurry before the next Congressional recess.
A bigger reason is that Seniors are having the wits scared out of them by talk of cost control, and constant reports of people like Ezekiel Emanuel musing about how we should farm off old people and concentrate on those in their societal prime.
The new scuttlebutt is that the "public option" should be held off, only to be ressurected by "triggers"- raising the standards for the private sector, and having the government step in and take over when they can't meet them.
Here is the core of it, folks: this White House wants to set a path to Single Payer in place before they rest this year. It has to be ennabled in a way that rescinding it is to be followed by charges of negligence of the uninsured (or newly insured).
They need to set up a no going back path.