Insurance companies attack; Rahmie's team surprised in their p.j.s

Just as the real healthcare fight is about to start and determine whether the people’s interests or the insurance behemoths’ will prevail, we get a nasty crack from some self-important White House suit, as reported by NBC’s John Harwood, about bloggers having to get serious and ‘out of their pajamas’.

The cowardly and anonymous phrase about pajamas has all the markings of a statement from Obama’s chief of staff and blogger nemesis, Emmanuel Rahm.

The timing is priceless as it just now becomes clear that the Obama team is actually the ones sucking their thumbs and playing with their teddy bears while the forces of finance capital prepare to blow up Washington. Over the weekend the insurer lobbying arm, AHIP (American Health Insurance Plans), unleashed the in-house ‘study’ it bought and paid for purporting to show how the new reforms will cost the average policyholder thousands. Hello, Harry and Louise!

So now the smoke and fog begins to clear from the stage, and we see how the big boys never planned to give up anything substantial to some fresh kid from Hawaii, whatever his temporary title. And how all the newly-influential, self-inflated and terminally full of themselves staffers like Emmanuel so delighted with their White House offices have been played by the real experts in hardball.

Now is the time when the Obama campaign should be mobilizing all its troops to generate a decisive groundswell of support for real reform, yes, including those pesky bloggers and ‘leftists’ whom Obama himself mocked in his healthcare speech to the legislature. When the attack ads begin, they had better be able to call on the legions of Obamanians from last year’s campaign as a counterforce.

Instead, the smart alecks Obama brought in with him were convinced that they, and only they, knew how to deal with political and social forces, that they were the ‘realists’ in opposition to the juvenile masses. They thought they were working amicably with the drug companies and insurers to find a reasonable compromise and merrily jettisoned one by one the elements that made the reforms palatable and real to the long-suffering electors, including but not limited to the public option.

Now White House Office of Health Reform director Nancy Ann DeParle admits that she was ‘blindsided’ by news of the insurance industry's study, meaning she is a naïve twit. Only amateurs are surprised by a double-cross from the adversary, and only double-morons admit that they were surprised to boot.

‘I’d spent a couple of hours with insurance industry folks last week’ said DeParle pathetically, ‘and yes I did feel blindsided. I did feel we were working constructively’. Where’s that power-business suit, Nance? Left at home in favor of a lounging kimono?

The Rahmites thought they were ‘working constructively’ and did the financial giants’ bidding by ignoring the complaints from useless bloggers and activists who merely went out and got their boss elected but who clearly do not understand the workings of power and government. Surprise, surprise, finance capital had a different idea.

It’s far too early to gloat on any side of this issue, but given the stakes involved, ER should put on tighter undies himself before criticizing the attire of his boss’s true allies. He needs to get out of his own jammies and stop swinging his equipment in public. It ain’t pretty.