Reaching out

"If the president says, 'Here is what I need in the bill,' and it doesn't include the public option, there will be no other way to interpret it than it was a retreat," added Weiner. "I speak for a lot of members who are allies of the president. We are prepared to take our lumps to get this important policy done. But I don't like this sense of us charging up the hill, and not only is the president not leading us, but he is not on the hill with us." Politico

There was a lot of talk last year about how Barack Obama would be a "transformational" president -- but true transformation, it turns out, requires a lot more than electing one telegenic leader. Actually turning this country around is going to take years of siege warfare against deeply entrenched interests, defending a deeply dysfunctional political system. Paul Krugman

As readers of my blog know, I've often been mercilessly skeptical of Barack Obama.

I have long feared that he was merely taking progressives for a ride in order to further his private agenda, in much the same way that Bush took the evangelicals for a ride, simply redirecting their energy and discipline in order to lower taxes for the rich.

Back in November I wrote:

The left is about ideas, about facing reality bravely with full unblinking consciousness. An opportunity for the left to rebuild itself arose in the unlikely shape of George W. Bush and now it is about to be wasted.

Now after lengthy labor pains, with much moaning and groaning, the mountain has given birth to a mouse.

What makes me sad and angry is that the consciousness that has been raised during the Bush years is going to be sanitized and neutered as we tell ourselves another soothing bedtime story about ourselves to ourselves.

When Obama addresses congress next week on public health I'll definitely know if I was right or wrong.

If he comes out strongly for a public option, which is as close as the USA could probably come to a real "national health" program, I will happily eat plate after plate of humble pie with a generous side order of crow.

If he dumps the public option -- which at this moment seems very likely -- I will feel that all my skepticism has been amply vindicated.

Eliminating the public option would be a tragic prevarication; a travesty and a betrayal of all those who have placed their faith in this man and who worked tirelessly to get him elected. They will know they have been used and discarded like a Kleenex in the futile search for a moderate center that no longer exists.

Because, one of the keys to understanding contemporary US politics is that, after Ronald Reagan's revolution (I put no quotes around the word "revolution"), the American center has been destroyed.

As Paul Krugman recently pointed out:

Moderate Republicans, the sort of people with whom one might have been able to negotiate a health care deal, have either been driven out of the party or intimidated into silence. Whom are Democrats supposed to reach out to, when Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa, who was supposed to be the linchpin of any deal, helped feed the "death panel" lies?

To use a favorite simile of the right, Obama is acting the part of Neville Chamberlain, thinking that he can cut deals with people who take no prisoners...

Obama has often been compared to Ronald Reagan, but except for their phenomenal communication skills, they have little or nothing in common.

Ronald Reagan was first and foremost an ideologue. Behind his amiable, folksy and slightly goofy exterior he was in his own way every bit as firmly entrenched in his extremist ideology as, say, Cambodia's Pol-Pot was in his... and as far removed from reality too.

Ronald Reagan was totally focused on moving the United States politics much farther to the right than its people actually were then, or are even today.

Reagan was able to redefine the parameters of American politics.

Barack Obama gives no sign of such focus or ambition of moving American back to where it was, much less of moving it to the left.

If Obama or anyone else really thinks that a Democratic president can "reach out" to the right and "unite", them behind him on anything, they are somewhere south of naive.

This a time to fight and this is good ground to fight on.

The chance to change American politics on a Reaganesque scale, to become the anti-Reagan, exists in the health care issue. Weakness here will cripple the Obama presidency: For all those that oppose him now or in the future will see the clear discontinuity between the hat and the cattle...

And make no mistake, Barack Obama's deadliest enemies are not in Tehran, the mountains of Afghanistan or Pakistan, much less in Beijing or Moscow, they are right there is Washington with him and they will show him no mercy if they are not brought to heel.

America is a better country in many ways than it was 35 years ago, but our political system's ability to deal with real problems has been degraded to such an extent that I sometimes wonder whether the country is still governable. Paul Krugman - New York Times

So now we are being told that president Barack Obama is Adolph Hitler... just like Saddam Hussein, Ahmadinejad or (fill in name of whosoever the American right wants to bomb at the moment).

They want to talk about Hitler? Lets talk about Hitler.

According to John Tolund, who most experts consider Hitler's definitive biographer, as early as 1918 German army doctors had diagnosed Hitler as a "psychopath with hysterical symptoms".

How did someone literally insane go so far?

It happened because Germany's top industrial families were so terrified of the communists in the context of the then collapsing German economy that they thought that the the triumph of the weird and wacky Hitler, the failed watercolorist from Vienna with his campy brown shirts, would favor their interests.

You could say that their bet paid off: although Germany was burned to the ground in WWII and perhaps 8.5 million Germans died, most of the great German industrial fortunes of the 1930s are still great fortunes today. If the communists had carried the day in Weimar Germany, quite possibly today's Krupps and Thyssens might be bussing dishes on the Ku'damm and sleeping rough in the Tiergarten... an outcome they were naturally eager to avoid.

From Germany's industrial oligarchy's -- albeit minority -- point of view, backing Hitler and destroying Germany was a reasonable business decision.

Who knows, perhaps, America's "good and the great" may be taking similar decisions today in order to defend what they, quite correctly, see as their interests, which perhaps are not the same interests as those of most of the rest of us.

Is the "Obama = Hitler" really crazy stuff?

You betcha.

But the crazy part is not the real story because for historical reasons, due to its origins as a refuge for religious eccentrics, the United States has always had much more than its share of crazies. Sinclair Lewis and H. L. Mencken had endless fun exposing America's deep vein of primitive weirdos. America treasures its crazies, they make us unique. Crazy is not the story.

The story is the money.

The question today is to determine who is paying for this particular campaign of organized insanity aimed at leaving America without a health plan.

Way back in May of 2007 I posted about the opening of a "Creationist Museum" in Kentucky that cost a cool $27,000,000, I entitled the post "High Rolling Holy Rollers with a Big Bank Roll". This snippet from my old post is relative to today's story:

One of the essential roots of American culture from the earliest days has been religious nonconformity and even religious manias. (...) What distinguishes today's holy rollers is the money they are finding to express themselves with. Traditionally these people, by definition uneducated refugees from a Flannery O'Connor short story, have always been dirt poor and outside the system. The $27m that this creationist museum cost is the real novelty here. Where is all the dough coming from for this "know-nothing Disneyland"?

For sure this campaign against health care is costing a lot more than the creationism museum and it is doubtful that it is being financed by the "widow's mite" of those whom Chris Rock so pungently described as "Broke-ass white people, livin' in a trailer home, eatin' mayonnaise sandwiches, fucking their sister, listening to John Cougar Mellencamp records..."

So here is the real job for America's investigative journalists and political junkies: cherchez l'argent... follow the money. History hinges on the money trail.