It's the season of giving but you'd never know it from today's Meet The Press, and everyone's working through this Christmas with the gifts being understated and modest at best. As a general rule, one should have very low expectations of people, all the time in all instances. Because if you do not, you end up feeling disgusted, frustrated, disappointed et al., like so much of the American public about the politics in this country.
Today's telling Meet The Press first featured White House Senior Adviser David Axelrod, pleading his case within almost every answer he gave on the merits of the present Healthcare reform bill. He spouted facts such as that 7 previous Presidents had tried to pass Healthcare and failed. That no bill this significant has ever passed without compromise. He softly argued that the Administration's core principals on healthcare have not been compromised with the bill in it's current form citing various fine-print statements by the President. But none of this left us convinced.
One of the methods, whether conscious or not, of the Obama Campaign/Administration has been to sell the ideal but not push hard enough for it and then settle for what others decide. During the campaign, Americans' collective expectations were so high on the idea of change and hope and a new idealism, there was no other way to go but down. However, there's down and there's thrown out the window and now we're left with the reality that the Administration didn't fight hard enough for them in the previous rounds of this heavyweight fight. David Gregory pointed out that the Administration didn't fight for the public option until the very end when it had no chance of surviving in the Senate, which is a compromised institution and that's putting it mildly.
Mr. Axelrod did rightly state that this Healthcare bill will make it affordable for 31 Million more Americans to get insurance, but later in the program during the panel discussion The Daily Kos' Markos Moulitsas framed it as 31 Million more people being able to buy into the current system. If his opinion is to be believed and that's what this bill real boils down to, then that's not reform. And you would be inclined to believe his general premise because why would insurance stocks close on Friday at 52 year high as Joe Scarborough, also on the panel, echoed Howard Dean from earlier in the program? Here we have a problem with the idealism/realism equation.
[By the way, Mr. Scarborough is good spouting and analysing facts, but no good at all with opinion calling Afghanistan and Healthcare a distraction from the job creation priority - one small example from today's program. ]
Howard Dean, former DNC Chair and Vermont Governor - today's second interview, said earlier this week that the bill should be scrapped and restarted. He did pull back from that today citing various amendment changes that represented 'positive' reform. However, he also stated that serious problems remain, one being that cost controls would not be applied to hospitals. But significantly said that if the final compromise bill between the House and Senate did not contain the public option, he could not support it.
Real Democrats and Progressives (not Blue Dogs) are not imploding as it is made out to seem. It's more correct to say that they are having a serious discussion while having to deal with Blue Dog agendas to achieve the traditional 60 votes in the Senate. [Always remember that the 60 vote majority is a Senate traditional, and not a rule of law.] And Dr. Dean understated it when he said the compromises in the Senate bill have been too much.
However, he accurately stated, in spite of his dissatisfaction, that the Republicans have acted reprehensibly. Their entire strategy is politically motivated. The reason we know this is that they haven't offered any real comprehensible solutions to the problem. And we'll at this point mention that Fmr. RNC Chair Ed Gillespie was also on today's panel, but all that can be said for his contribution to the discussion was forwarding Republican talking points.
So in the Senate, you have the Progressives gnawing at each other, Blue Dog Democrats holding the majority hostage with personal political agenda items, and Republican Senators collectively doing everything they can to obstruct, delay, sabotage, and ultimate crash the bill. Here is your reality.
"Where is the principal we started out with?" PBS's Tavis Smiley asked. "This is not the healthcare we were promised," he also stated. Americans wanted healthcare for all and now that we've gotten so far along from that idea, opinion and hope have soured. Mr. Smiley opined that the Administration lost its first big fight with an entrenched lobby. And that leaves us to ask how will the Administration do in its next major bout? Compromising and parrying?
Mr. Smiley also threw this one out there, "Campaigning and governing are two different things." Yes, they are. Campaigning is talking about the fights you're going to pick, and governing is fighting those fights. And even if you lose, if you go down swinging, the ideals stay in tact.
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