Obamacare, Here We Come

With the House looking set to vote on and likely pass national health care on Sunday, the crown jewel of President Obama's (and most of the Democratic party's) legislative agenda is within tantalizingly close reach. The Republicans are setting their heels to resist this thing tooth and nail in both the House and Senate, but it's really looking like the United States might be just about ready to join the developed world in offering universal health care by Monday morning. For better or worse, we're about to take the plunge, and after a lot of soul-searching, I'd argue that what should have been incontestably "for better" has shamefully become "for worse."

Today's Post quoted House Minority Leader John Boehner as saying that "The American people are saying 'Stop!' and they're screaming at the top of their lungs." Republicans, he vowed, will "do everything that we can do to make sure that this bill never, ever, ever passes." The sad part is that he's got a point, at least with the first half of that statement. Thanks to the administration and the Democratic leadership having made an utter hash of this bill, people have every reason to be screaming "Stop!" on fiscal grounds, regardless of all the other baggage (kickbacks, abortion, and all the other goodies buried in this unpalatable sausage) this bill carries. The farcical calculations of the enabling book-cookers at the Congressional Budget Office notwithstanding, this legislation simply doesn't add up. If this were the late 1990's, with a budget surplus and a healthy economy, I'd be inclined to say "Pass it first, we can always go back and fix it later." Sadly, given the shambles the economy is currently in, I simply do not believe that a bill like this can be passed in good conscience.

I'd argue that Congress knows it, too. As if passing this thing through the back-door process of budget reconciliation--a parliamentary tool never intended to be used on legislation this big--wasn't slimy enough, the House has now dusted off yet another convoluted, cover-my-ass measure to avoid taking any credit (i.e. responsibility) for this thing. I have no idea what in the world convinced Pelosi and her Oompa-Loompas this might be a good idea after the furor raised by the prospect of reconciliation, but she has decided that the best way to massage this thing is to pass it without even acknowledging it. Why does Pelosi like it? Because "people don't have to vote on the Senate bill," that's why. If she thinks that's going to save Democratic skins in November, she probably deserves to lose the leadership, if not the majority.

As if taking pride in finding a way to weasel out of actually putting this bill per se on anyone's voting record didn't show enough gall, Pelosi was quoted today as saying that the bill is "a triumph for the American people in terms of deficit-reduction." Um, bullshit. If I was about to pass a triumphal piece of legislation, I'd want that sucker front and center on my voting record. If I didn't, my constituents ought to be worried about me. Based on the deadlocked, bitterly partisan, compromise-free zone the U.S. Congress has become, I'm not sure that it would be realistic to hope for a second chance at health care under Obama if this one doesn't go through, no matter if he's elected to a second term or not. Based on his mishandling of this process from start to finish, that'd be just too damn bad.

I seem to recall Candidate Obama--then working in the Congress himself--deploring the petty, partisan, small-minded embarrassment that body had become. What on Earth caused President Obama to cast aside his own logic and entrust the drafting of the bill to that very same institution is beyond me. I do believe that this country elected him with a mandate for change, and letting someone else make the sausage for his signature domestic agenda item was, in a word, shameful. You're the President of the United States--lead, dammit! And do it from the front: it took until just recently for Obama to actually articulate his own vision of his legislative holy grail in front of some real, live Republicans, and even then it was basically an edited version of the Senate bill. Fixing partisanship does not mean waiting on Congress to fix itself. It's clearly incapable of that. If you've just been given such a mandate for hope and change, Mr. President, why wait around for Congress to give you some to sign when you could have written it yourself (presumably without "Cornhusker kickbacks" and all the other junk the Congress would inevitably cram into it) and then served it up for a vote with the kind of intellectual, rhetorical-flourishy, hope-and-changey message you so like to give? If you're going to be "the law professor," teach this country why it needs your bill. If you're going to be the Chief Executive, execute.

At this juncture, I agree with the Republicans: it's in the national interest to tear up this bill and start again. Not that I trust the Republicans to follow through on the starting again end of the deal, but I don't trust the Democrats willingness or ability to improve the bill after "passing" it enough to root for their success. I can't productively criticize Pelosi, Reid, or the Congress much more than I already have, other than to say, Shame on them, and their constituents should validate their elected representatives' terror of them at the ballots this fall. But shame, too, on Obama and the White House for being just as reluctant to attach his name and reputation to what was intended to be his seminal achievement as the Congress has been, albeit under the guise of post-partisan leadership. Declining to write your legacy the way you want it isn't leadership, it's cowardice no matter how you slice it. The great Presidents have been remembered as such not for their willingness to sit around waiting for someone else to bring their priorities to them for signature but for their proactive role in shaping and authoring their key initiatives as much as possible. The author of the Declaration of Independence and founder of the American liberal democratic tradition, Thomas Jefferson, went so far as to write his own epitaph. If Obama couldn't be bothered to craft and defend his prize, dare I say that maybe he doesn't deserve to see it realized?

At the end of the day, Obama's failure to take authorship of his own destiny is what I see as the great shame and sadness in this badly-botched process. Not owning it from the start opened the door for Congress to do so, when the risks of letting that happen should have been glaringly obvious all along (kind of like trying the architect of 9/11 in downtown New York City). In a farcically fitting ending, Congress itself has now settled on an ultra-sleazy method of doubly insulating itself from the passage of its own excrement. While head-in-cement syndrome is par for the course in Congress these days, it was not expected of Obama, and his succumbing to the commonest of Washington insider ailments is what ultimately doomed what should have been a defining, triumphal "Welcome to the 21st Century" moment for this country to become Pelosi's "triumph" of cowardice, waste, and outright untruth. If ramming this through against the wishes of Americans is a shame, selling something no one will take ownership of for its obvious brokenness as a fiscal triumph is an outright sin.

As one of my professors likes to say, "Never underestimate people's intelligence, but never overestimate their information." "Professor" Obama's fundamental failing in this process was to ignore both halves of this dictum. Given a chance, the country has been known to formulate a coherent opinion of what it wants, whether or not Congress sees things the same way. On Obamacare, the White House never gave us that chance. Obama should have crafted one of his ballyhooed orations and delivered it to the people, making a clarion case for his agenda. If that was indeed the kind of hope and change America wanted or could be persuaded that it wanted (after all, a leader is supposed to be able to get others to want what he wants and make them think it's their own idea), America could have ganged up with Obama and rammed (sensible) health care down Congress's throat rather than the other way around.

Welcome to the sorry and shameful state of partisan politics today. If we can't even trust St. Obama to present us with truthful information, thoughtfully considered, and then to trust our collective intelligence to come to the right conclusions with it, we should indeed be screaming "Stop!" the madness at the top of our lungs. With the halfway point of one of the most widely-anticipated terms in recent history rapidly approaching, it's time for some serious soul-searching at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. There's no hope in following the old truism about insanity, doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result every time. Congress has proven that it can't be trusted, so why trust it again and again and hope for the best? A chief executive of Obama's political and rhetorical skills and with the kind of approval ratings and connection to the public that he began his term with in sharp contrast to his predecessor ought to be clever enough to overcome 535 reactionary, election-oriented cranks by generating real popular support for his agenda. At least taking some ownership and authorship of that agenda--in short, showing us that he's in fact glad to be the President, as a recent Post op-ed argued--would be a good start. Absent that, what are we left with but plus ca change we can't believe in?