We Elected This??

Why does it feel like Clinton, or rather Clintonism, won the election?

If there was any one thing that convinced me to go with Obama as an agent of change, it was the precedent-setting debacle engineered by Bill & Hillary on health. They started out by dumping the simple (though not easy) defense of single-payer/Medicare-style socialized medicine, designed instead a gargantuan, multi-headed mutant in an attempt to satisfy everyone except the supposed beneficiaries, managed the whole process with a tin political ear, buckled in the face of opposition, gave away the store, lost anyway and set back health care reform two decades.

Does this sound at all familiar?

Some argue that Obama has changed the approach by allowing Congress to generate its own plan instead of pitching them a 1000-page package created by an extra-parliamentary commission. Okay, so now that Congress has allowed insurance-industry shill Max Baucus to generate something even worse, what is the game plan?

Baucus looked pathetic standing there alone with his silly proposal after spending months with his head between Chuck Grassley’s knees and being told to get lost anyway. This is exactly what makes people turn to the Republicans for clear leadership because they take a position and stick to it. They stand for something, repugnant though it may be, and it doesn’t take a linguist, an acrobat and a psychoanalyst to figure out what it is.

I was impressed with Obama’s speech because he finally laid out the terms upon which this debate should have been built from the beginning. But I’d rather fund-raise for the Butte Copper Museum than ask any thinking person to lift a finger to support Max’s Montana turkey.

If this is the best the Democratic leadership can do with a massive popular mandate, then they deserve whatever hits them next. It would be terrible to lose an opportunity for health care reform, but it would be even worse to have to live through four years of Clinton-redux on this and every other important issue and then see the reactionaries sweep back into power anyway.