Gut check time for Obama

So now President Obama will address Congress next week about health care reform. Pardon my French, but it’s about damned time he did something to further what was supposed to be his top priority. His tactic, if it can be called that, of letting Congress figure out the details of health care reform, has created a colossal mess, with three different Congressional committees doing their usual slow-motion crawl to a deadlock. Obama’s increasingly annoying habit of reacting to conservatives’ over-the-top blustering and lies by delivering a professorial lecture has been unhelpful, to put it mildly. Dude, it’s politics, not a civics class. If health care reform really is your top priority, then fight back, for God’s sake. As longtime political writer Gene Lyons puts it in Salon, Obama “hasn’t just brought a knife to a gunfight, he’s brought a cake knife.”

White House aides are saying that although Obama will insist on a pubic option as part of the package, he may be willing to accept dumping proposals to have Medicare pay for counseling on end-of-life care — what top Republicans have misrepresented (i.e., lied through their teeth) as “death panels.” That would be an outrage. Politically, it won’t get Obama even one more Republican vote – how many times do they have to figuratively spit in his face before he understands their inflexibility? Moreover, it’s simply a terrible idea to give in to pure, raw ignorance, which is all the screaming about “death panels” amounts to. The speech next week will tell us a lot about Obama’s political savvy, and whether, as many of his supporters from the election are wondering, he has enough fire in the guts to get his agenda enacted.

This article appears in Sep 1-8, 2009.