alias Bruce.

On Obama, Republicans, and ad agency politics.

Yesterday, Sen. Ben Cardin (D-MD) acknowledged "naivete" on the part of President Obama and the Democrats in their having expected Republican cooperation on issues such as health care reform. Speaking on a Maryland radio program, Cardin conceded that Obama and the Dems lost precious inertia by dawdling with obstinate Republicans, and that Repubs have been far better at public messaging on health care reform than Dems.

That's not news. But it does get me to considering why Republicans are better at messaging. It's because they have to be – for the same reason that an ad agency has to be more clever and manipulative in selling an unneeded or unhelpful product than it would be in selling a product that actually works.

Think of the Repubs as the ad agency. They are selling bad products (e.g., tax cuts for the rich, status-quo corporate health care) that citizens would soundly reject if they understood them. So the brainy, witty ad creatives hunker down and craft deviously distractive (and false) messages: the jobs generated by lowering plutocrats' taxes, the Obama "death panels," the consumer benefits of a "free-market" menu of "health care choice," and so on.

Think of Obama and the Dems as the poor schlumps who don't understand that their product offerings are up against this amoral ace of an ad agency. The Dems actually offer a superior product, if sometimes marginally so. But they lack both fight and imagination. So they delude themselves into thinking that if they simply stand around and make polite remarks to the effect of, "Well, hey, if you look at our product you'll see that it's actually better," the public will flock to their side. But politics demands much more. It demands a passionate, rhetorically inspiring, relentless championing of one's case and a nonstop and stirring rebuttal of that of one's opponents.

This does not mean that Obama and the Dems need to descend to the Repubs' brand of mean, character-assassinating attacks – the kind of speech that the tragedy in Arizona ought to steer us away from. It means, instead, that the President and his party need to rise up in an uplifting FDR-style offensive: crusading for their best ideas and forcefully and methodically exposing the lies of the opposition.

Standing up for the public interest with passionate, bold conviction is not the same as character assassination. Some publicly-minded sales-pitch maven needs to pull aside the Obama team and explain this to them.

In the wake of the Arizona shooting today

of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D) and a number of others, we don't yet know whether the apparent assassination attempt on Giffords had anything to do with her having narrowly defeated a Tea Party candidate, and her having supported President Obama's health plan against the wrath of Tea Partiers, and her state having become the current capital of gun-toting wing-nut vigilante hysteria, and her having been placed literally in the crosshairs on Sarah Palin's people-to-get website.

As the story continues to unfold and the political demagogues who helped nurture such a climate in Arizona now utter somber platitudes about this "senseless tragedy," this excerpt from an AOL News item on Giffords' shooting provides some perspective:

"The Democrat narrowly defeated tea party-backed Republican Jesse Kelly to win a third House term in November. The election capped a year of heated political rhetoric directed at Giffords and other Democrats who supported the new health care law. In March, Giffords' congressional office in Tucson was vandalized after she voted in favor of the bill. Sarah Palin included Giffords on a list of Democratic candidates in the crosshairs for defeat in the midterm elections because of their support for the overhaul. When asked by the New York Post whether his daughter had any enemies, Spencer Giffords, 75, tearfully replied: 'The whole tea party.' Palin, whose map of targested Democrats was taken down soon after the shooting, posted condolences on her Facebook page, saying, 'On behalf of Todd and my family, we all pray for the victims and their families, and for peace and justice.'"

Your nation at work:

The broad-daylight assassination of Salman Taseer, high-profile governor of Pakistan's Punjab Province, by one of his own bodyguards, apparently an Islamic militant, has blasted another bloody hole in the Obama Administration's fantasy that robot drones and widely-mistrusted American battalions have a prayer of altering the fundamental course of Pakistan and Afghanistan, two nations in which America refuses to confront the reasons for the public illegitimacy of the regimes it tries in vain to prop up.

Meanwhile, modern descendants of North America's most disastrous and violent tsunami of illegal immigrants -- centuries of invaders from Europe -- have grown ever more wickedly and delusionally selfish in their fervor to shut the gates behind themselves, most recently with a growing effort to deny citizenship to babies born in the United States whose parents came here illegally from the artificially-depressed and peril-wracked storehouse of desperately cheap labor to our south, otherwise known as Mexico.

At the White House, the Obama Administration has collapsed on the issue of Medicare coverage for end-of-life planning, doing a 180 to delete the provision, which had been hailed by doctors and hospice caregivers as a way of making end-of-life medical care both more humane and cost-effective. Any suggestions for names to be circulated for an alternative 2012 Democratic presidential nominee?

It's your country. Use it or lose it. And whatever you do, keep yourself grounded in things that are not subject to the decay and inevitable collapse of the unsustainable machinery that passes for current American normalcy.

Brand-name drug prices rose 8% in July,

and over the last five years prices of the most popular brand-name drugs skyrocketed 41.5 percent, while the consumer price index went up by only 13.3 percent, according to AARP.

Pharma companies, continuing to gorge on fat profits, tried to counter this latest incriminating news with the lame explanation that more consumers are saving money with cheaper generics.

Note that "saving money" with generics often means a customer's simply giving up fewer pounds of flesh at the pharmacy cash register.

<RANT> Hey, Fat Pharma: why do you suppose customers are flocking to generics in the first place, given that generics are sometimes not the equal of brand-name drugs? Could it be because of your brand-name price gouging itself? Could it be because your insatiable greed has rendered the American brand-name drug market completely dysfunctional? Funny, isn't it, how the prices set as "fair" by drug companies in the U.S. are often spectacularly higher than the same companies' "fair" prices for the very same drugs in other countries, including other industrialized nations.

The only folks for whom America's health care system now works are: 1.) Big drug and medical equipment manufacturers and their large shareholders; 2.) To a lesser degree, insurance companies, who do indeed profit but feel driven to screw policyholders because of the insane costs of drugs and private-sector medical care; and 3.) Rich people.

And oh, yes, senators and congresspersons, including those who call Obama a socialist, receive terrific health care -- at the expense of American taxpayers who don't.

It has now reached the point where the pharmacists and clerks where I pick up my bank-busting prescriptions heartily agree with me when I growl that American health care is completely broken.

Campaign finance reform, anyone? </RANT>

When health care means race.

It's not as if it's controversial to say it: a big, spit-soddened chunk of the rage of the anti-Obama far right is plain old racism.

I am as critical of President Obama's health care policy as anyone. To me it is an excruciating irony to see Obama now parading around the country vowing to never put the greedy insurance industry "back in the driver's seat" when, in fact, he and that greedy industry jointly crafted a bill that keeps private insurers solidly in said seat. The guy can talk a fight, without fighting one, better than perhaps any other politician I've ever seen. Just as absurd is the credulous way in which many journalists now accept and repeat the script that this legislation is a "sweeping" initiative worthy of near-awe as a political accomplishment when, in fact, it is nothing of the kind. It is, instead, a timid little dollop of increased industry regulation combined with a captive market bonanza for insurance companies. Honestly, I don't think most reporters for the New York Times or the Washington Post would know a truly transformative social policy if it bulldozed their houses. So easily impressed, they are. We may indeed be better off with this bill than without it -- which I think remains to be seen -- but that is like saying you are better off being mugged at gunpoint for most of your cash than for all of it. The tragedy is that so much more was feasibly doable had the Dems had the necessary nerve and political common sense.

But that is an argument about policy and politics -- which is not what is fueling the extremes we now see in the hateful heart of the far right. We're talking about a protester literally spitting on the face of Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-MO), a black veteran of the civil rights wars, as Cleaver walked past the crowd. We're talking about the N-word being spewed at Obama and at other black politicians by allegedly anti-health-reform mobs. Signs depicting Obama as Hitler. Websites calling for violence against the administration. The explosive growth of a "tea party" movement of "patriots" who slept through American history in high school and who dozed through the authoritarian and unconstitutional outrages of the Bush administration. A single timid step toward run-of-the-mill regulation of a rapacious industry being hysterically treated as a "government takeover" of health care.   

Sure, the routine foam-in-the-cranium paranoia of the screaming rightie set -- some of which we saw in the Clinton years -- can explain some of the anger against the ideas that Obama (supposedly) represents. But it cannot begin to explain the extent or the extremes of it. Look into the bloodshot eyes of the nearly-all-white gangs of protesters you see hollering bloody murder outside the White House gates, and you will see the same thing that the abolitionists and the Freedom Riders and the voting rights marchers encountered in their respective struggles: a wild white fear that The Niggers Are Taking Over. This is the true source of the crazily personalized way in which the extreme "anti-health-care-reform" movement is waging its jihad against Obama.

As I have said, there is plenty of cause both on the reasoned right and on the reasoned left for informed dismay or disdain about the current state of so-called Health Care Reform. But the core of the fanatical Obama-is-a-Communist-who's-going-to-come-and-get-me camp is basically a trembling bunch of racist weenies who still have not accepted the 1960s, let alone the 21st Century.

Jimmy Carter, as is often the case, is one of the few prominent whites to utter such a truth in public. Plenty of his well-placed white peers, I am sure, acknowledge it in private, shaking their heads about the white peasantry. And many more of we black, brown and white citizens see it as well. It's plain as day what is going on here.

Marx may have been right, in Europe, about religion being the principal opiate of the miserable masses. But here in the New World, the most destructive mass addiction is of a different variety.

Whether health care reform passes or not,

we've been screwed. Many of us, I among them, have said for months that the bill is a loser (even if it passes) because it consists almost exclusively of things that people dislike. It is poison to both the right and the left and questionable to the center because it poses government mandates that fail to serve the public interest; instead, its mandates for coverage simply prop up a dysfunctional private insurance system. And it leaves off the table the elements that some of the center and all of the left recognize as basic to real reform: price controls, streamlining of the industry's massive administrative waste and redundancy, a public option.

The resulting plan's unpopularity is not an accident, Fox and RNC misinformation and MoveOn.org desperation notwithstanding. Who would actually put forth such so-called "health care reform" except for insurance lobbyists and their friends in the Obama administration?

A piece by Lex at The Agonist describes, more incisively than most analyses I've seen, why this is so. An excerpt:

This is a bill that the insurance industry, for-profit hospitals and pharmaceutical companies will accept. They're willing to accept it because without the sorts of "reforms" contained in this bill they will experience catastrophic failure and massive amounts of popular ill will in the not too distant future. That's why it's accurate to call this a preemptive bailout rather than reform. At this point, the bill does not regulate insurance rates. It stipulates that you can't be denied coverage or limited in your use of insurance, but it does not regulate how much you'll pay for that coverage. It only says that you're required to purchase coverage. The end effect then is to entrench the current system so deeply that further reforms are unlikely to be successful...actual reform that is. Politicians may fiddle around the edges, but the system that delivers sub-optimal care at great cost is here to stay.

Further down in the piece, Lex addresses the politics of how the Obama team has dealt with the health care issue from the beginning:

It takes a great deal of gullibility to swallow the idea that this [bill] is the very best possible. It requires willful ignorance of the proceedings. Did they mobilize the activist base to push hard for the best possible options with the knowledge that some compromise would be necessary? Nope. They took all that off the table before beginning negotiations. Did they look around the world for all the different ways to address this issue and present them to the American people for debate? Nope. They held secret meetings with the industry they're supposedly reforming before the process started. Did a new president with a strong mandate, a deep pool of eager activists and fine oratorical skills ever make a pitch to convince the majority of Americans - of all political affiliations - that we can...and we must...do something about this issue that will put us on a strong social and economic future for the long term. Nope. He pretty much crafted this bill behind the curtain and then pretends that his hands are tied by recalcitrant Congresspeople from the GOP and the necessity of bipartisan warm fuzzies.

It galls me to no end to see President Obama now out on the stump passionately asking us to fight alongside him for a bad bill that came to be precisely because he was afraid to fight.

To paraphrase Tracy Chapman, "Give me one reason to trust you/And I'll turn right back around."

This from a new Gallup poll post:

In U.S., 45% Favor, 48% Oppose Obama Healthcare Plan

Americans who oppose a "healthcare reform bill similar to the one proposed by President Obama" outnumber those in favor by 48% to 45%. Since September, sentiment has grown among opponents that the legislation would raise healthcare costs and not address real problems in the system.

I think this is why Obama and the Dem's tepid "health reform" porridge of the past year has been exactly the wrong thing to put on the table. It is the worst of both worlds: sticking Americans with the same old broken system while making enough small changes to inflame industry and anger reactionaries. Now, as things threaten to completely collapse, Obama is gamely and passionately putting on his fight face. But it may be far too late.

Not much I can say about

President Obama's State of the Union speech, partly because I was busy giving a poetry reading that night (it went well, but I swear he had his people book his gig for the same night as mine after he read what I've written about him), and partly because, upon review, his speech struck me as unremarkably Obamian. He chastised Repubs for pushing his nose into the dirt and demanded that they now share responsibility for his governing from a prone position; he throatily exhorted his fellow Dems to not cave in to opposition as he has; and he left many of us wondering, again, how soon his actions will undercut his well-meant declarations. All run-of-the-mill stuff, given what we have gotten accustomed to over the past year.

I do think all of the exclaiming and arm-waving over Obama's biting remark about the recent Supreme Court campaign finance ruling is just silly. And I give Obama credit for calling it the way it is: in today's United States, further opening the legal spigot on corporate political expenditures is like giving a 500-pound man a lifetime all-you-can-eat pass to McDonald's. And the alleged drama of Justice Samuel Alito's read-my-lips displeasure? Please. To paraphrase Washington Football Team ex-running back John Riggins' famous tipsy quip to Justice Sandra Day O'Connor: Loosen up, Sammy baby. You're one of nine jurists on perhaps the most powerful open court on the planet, but you have trouble handling it when a president declares in your presence that your recent earth-shaking ruling will take down some buildings? It's not as if Obama's statement was a personal attack. This is as high-stakes a policy matter as one can imagine, one that may define what politics and policy will look like for the next generation. What Obama said, and where he said it, was both proper and principled, in spite of law professors and commentators harrumphing about impoliteness. I'd say the outright selling of our campaign machinery is a far sight more rude to the nation than a president's calling attention to such a travesty. Good for Obama that he spoke up. I don't know why this thing has people's breeches all knotted up anyway; if the past 12 months are any guide, Obama will show us more rhetoric than leadership on this issue as with others.

Meanwhile, meaningful health care reform -- despite the raised eyebrows about Obama's shift away from health care in his speech -- has been a moot point since long before Martha Coakley lost in Massachusetts. It looks as if many in the thick of this thing, including some of those who cover it for corporate news organizations, remain blind to what actually happened: Obama lost on significantly reforming health care not because he tried to do too much but because he tried to do too little, and in so doing he both eroded his base and emboldened his opponents.

Nothing illuminates this journalistic haze more than the opening sentence of Saturday's front-page Washington Post story by Paul Kane and Shailagh Murray, which blithely began,

"A day after President Obama called on them to renew efforts to pass his ambitious agenda, Democrats..."

followed soon after, farther down in the story, with the reporters' assertion that:

"The first order of business continues to be the far-reaching health-care bill that Obama..."

Neither reporter Kane nor Murray, I think it is safe to say, would know a truly "ambitious agenda" or "far-reaching bill" if it bulldozed their newsroom. This is the sort of news coverage we get from major-media journalists who lack the vision to even imagine the possible, and who well-meaningly pass on to us their miniaturized idea of potential social change. One needn't be a Marxist-Leninist or an anarchist to scan a broader field of health policy possibility. A glance, say, across our northern border would do.

When a sad little lump of leftovers is presented to us as an "ambitious agenda," you know it is time for new voices in Washington.

Glass Half Empty, Half Full, or Broken?

Mark Murray blogged Monday on MSNBC's website about President Obama's approval rating falling below 50 percent for the first time in his presidency. Two reader comments from the many in response to Murray:

I'm Independent by choice Redneck by heritage. We are seeing what happens when we as the people try to get things back to doing business the right way. The President was elected to move us forward. As far as I can see he's still at it. In this effort not everyone is going to get exactly what they want when they want it. This is why I don't put much stock in incremental polls. You cannot govern by them. So far I still have faith in the process and I don't particularly attribute some of these "failures" to The President. Life tells me you have to get in there and take what you can get when you can get and move on. It is good to see the Country finally dealing with these issues rather than sitting on it's hands and putting it off till tommorow. Let's get everything out there where eveyone can see it, make a decision and move on. Just like the snow if your moving you ain't stuck just slowed up a little bit.Stick with it folks.
-Independent Redneck Va. (Sent Monday, December 21, 2009 11:49 AM)

Obama's numbers will continue to drop.  He is full of empty Rhetoric.  I worked for his, convince many people of his wanting to change the way business was done in Wahington, Donated money too him, and voted for him.  There is no substance too this man.  She is a shell.  I will never work for,donate too, nor vote for any democrat that voted for this insurance bill.  Thst includes my two state senators.
-[Reader from] Spotsylvania, Va. (Sent Monday, December 21, 2009 11:50 AM)

Both the spelling and grammar of American voting adults just keep getting terrifyingly worse, don't they, even when you figure in careless typing. (Who knows what that "she" thing is about; "s" and "h" are far apart on the keyboard.) But I think the two comments also show how torn many of we voters are, not only among ourselves but sometimes within ourselves, about the makeup of this president.

As I've written before, to me Obama looks more and more like a guy who plays a passionate public advocate on TV. I've always regarded him with some skepticism even as I've felt inspired by his potential. But now I just plain don't believe him any more. Most recently, his caving in on doctors' and hospitals' and insurers' demands on health care reform -- while he brayed about having stood up to "special interests" -- was downright theatrical in its irony. If it weren't so bloody tragic I'd have sworn he was playing it for laughs.

But there is a coldly factual argument to be made for Obama's having at least gained something. I'm not saying I buy this as rationale for his Jello-like stance on health care policy. But I also have trouble with the notion that he has brought no incremental progress. A year ago, don't forget, we had you-know-who in the White House. Moreover, we can pretty well imagine how many minutes the mere phrase "health care reform" would have survived in a McCain/Palin administration.

So it seems fair to try to do a little ciphering regarding Obama's performance to date on health care. Say, an equation: Gains minus Losses plus Mitigating Factors equals Results, or G - L + M = R. Mind you, I had to take algebra twice. But here goes. I'll look only at the major elements.

GAINS:
- Prohibition of insurance discrimination by pre-existing conditions. If this actually happens as promised (a big "if"), it's big stuff. Millions will be freed from perhaps the most draconian health insurance scheme ever. It will mean coverage and potential choices for many who are now trapped by their present insurers.
- Coverage of more uninsured people. Again, this gain could yet evaporate into hot air. And, at best, it will fall far short of solving the uninsured problem. But if it survives in some form, it's something, yes?
- The actual uttering of the phrases "public insurance option" and "single-payer" by an American president in our lifetime.

LOSSES:
- Lost leverage on all issues of health reform due to Obama's negotiating away so much of his power at the outset in the delusion of "bipartisanship." Any card player knows that you don't put everything on the table at once. You hold some cards and you play your hand, a card at a time, to your best advantage. Obama had a decent hand to start, with proposals that remained popular in the polls even after the town meeting loony fests. He squandered it by letting his opponents know that he was willing to give up just about anything.
- The death of a public option, the centerpiece of any meaningful health care reform. A government program has by far the most leverage to bring down prices and streamline administrative costs. Without it, the hope of significantly cutting costs and reining in the insurance monarchy is nil.
- The squelching of the reimportation proposal (bringing in American-made drugs from other countries where they are priced much more cheaply), which Obama campaigned for as a candidate but turned diametrically against once he took office and faced pressure from the pharmaceutical industry and its elected representatives.
 
MITIGATING FACTORS:
- A rabidly obstructionist Republican Party whose vocabulary consists mainly of "no," and whose flacks savagely beat the bushes to keep the GOP base in a wild-eyed panic and other voters flummoxed and intimidated.
- A spineless Democratic Party that cannot hold its unity on core issues even when it holds a majority.
- A voting population that has largely forgotten what it means to stand and protest for a shared cause.

'Course, we can't quantitatively weigh which of these factors matter most; it's still a judgment call. And let's not forget that a "loss" of potential progress is still not an objective loss when compared with the status quo. My own subjective calculation is that we'll be lucky if we see controls on pre-existing conditions that are not riddled with loopholes; we've lost huge opportunities that were within our grasp but for our leaders' lack of fortitude and our lack of outrage; and the real obstacles Obama has faced are abetted by his weakness of character.

Or, to put it another way: G = about a yard's progress; L = about a mile of ground we ought to have been able to gain given public opinion and the facts of health care; M = barriers that could have slowed but not stopped a leader who wasn't scared of the opposition's shadow; and R = a dropped glass and spilled possibility.

Stormfront.org and Affordable Mental Health Care.

In doing some recent research I visited Stormfront,org, a self-described white nationalist site whose motto is "White Pride World Wide." It's a safe bet that a large proportion of Stormfront adherents are not thrilled with the movement for health care reform. Which is ironic, because affordable mental health therapy for chronic insecurity and delusional displaced rage could help many of these folks to gain the very self-esteem and sense of human power for which they so miserably yearn. Not to mention putting them in touch with the actual world.

The Stormfront site trembles with the wringing of hands about trampled and violated whiteness, e.g., a headline wailing, "Vladimir Putin's non-White girlfriend gives birth to his first son."

But my favorite of the posts I saw was from a contributor named Sean 0x1488, who wrote:

There was at one point in time, a pure stock white race, I want to know where we came from, and achieve purity again, we are far to perfect looking to be from monkeys, perhaps our design was based on the primate, but we are far from monkeys.

Spelling, punctuation, and description of evolutionary classification are quoted exactly as they were written by this specimen of perfection.