mka 193 had a diary on the Rec List for most of the day celebrating President Obama's smackdown of Ben Nelson, who is "none too happy" about the President's proposal to end federally-subsidized student loans by private lenders, putting the money instead into direct loans of federal funds to the students themselves.
It's a great diary. But there is another aspect to this battle that I think is even more intriguing than the "return to the Chicago way" that mka's diary is celebrating. I was bemused when I originally heard the language of the President's speech on this topic, but I thought, "Nah, I must be imagining things."
But after seeing mka's diary, dalladoc's comment, and today's Gallup Poll results, I'm wondering if it might not be too audacious to hope that my initial reading between the lines of Obama's speech is correct -- that he is laying the groundwork for a possible attempt to enact single-payer health care at some point in his term in office.
First, take a look at the actual words of the speech, my emphasis added (I've also embedded the video, but at least on my computer it's pretty herky-jerky, so you may prefer just reading it).
. . .[T]uition has grown ten times faster than a typical family's income, putting new pressure on families that are already strained and pricing far too many students out of college altogether. Yet, we have a student loan system where we're giving lenders billions of dollars in wasteful subsidies that could be used to make college more affordable for all Americans.
This trend -- a trend where a quality higher education slips out of reach for ordinary Americans -- threatens the dream of opportunity that is America's promise to all its citizens. It threatens to widen the gap between the haves and the have-nots. And it threatens to undercut America's competitiveness. . . .
Right now, there are two main kinds of federal loans. First, there are Direct Loans. These are loans where tax dollars go directly to help students pay for tuition, not to pad the profits of private lenders. The other kinds of loans are Federal Family Education Loans. These loans, known as FFEL loans, make up the majority of all college loans. Under the FFEL program, lenders get a big government subsidy with every loan they make. And these loans are then guaranteed with taxpayer money, which means that if a student defaults, a lender can get back almost all of its money from our government.
And there's only one real difference between Direct Loans and private FFEL loans. It's that under the FFEL program, taxpayers are paying banks a premium to act as middlemen -- a premium that costs the American people billions of dollars each year. Well, that's a premium we cannot afford -- not when we could be reinvesting that same money in our students, in our economy, and in our country.
And that's why I've called for ending the FFEL program and shifting entirely over to Direct Loans. It's a step that even a conservative estimate predicts will save tens of billions of tax dollars over the next ten years. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the money we could save by cutting out the middleman would pay for 95 percent of our plan to guarantee growing Pell Grants. This would help ensure that every American, everywhere in this country, can out-compete any worker, anywhere in the world.
Opening the Doors of Higher Education from White House on Vimeo.
When I heard it, I immediately thought, "Wow. He's giving a great justification for single-payer health care; just substitute 'health care' for 'college' and 'education,' and 'profits' for 'subsidies.'"
But I know Obama's clearly stated position on single-payer care: NOT.
Or at least . . . not now.
Still, it seemd odd to me that his language was so forceful. I mean, yes, education is one of the big planks in his platform, but really, to make such a populism-fest out of the issue of how student loans are structured? And besides, the parallel to health care was so striking, it seems almost impossible that he'll be able to ignore it when he starts speaking to the health care issue.
I thought about diarying the topic that day, but I decided I was being silly, and if no one else saw the same thing in it that I saw, I must just be whistling Dixie.
Then today, I saw a succession of data bits and commentary that made me think maybe I'm not entirely crazy.
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First was the latest Gallup poll results. Obama's generally been gaining ground in the Gallup approval rating over the past week, and today his numbers are the highest they've been since the Inauguration bump receded except for a few days when he spiked in late March. He's at 66% approve, 27 % disapprove.
The man's got some muscle to flex.
Next, I noticed another Gallup article saying that two-thirds of Americans think Obama has made a "sincere effort" to work on a bipartisan basis with Congressional Republicans, while only 38% think the Rethugs have made a similar effort.
As dallasdoc said,
As most of us suspected, Obama established his bipartisan bona fides and let his Republican opponents marginalize themselves. Now let them continue to whine about Obama not being as bipartisan as he promised -- will anybody listen?
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Then I read mka's diary. Wow -- looks like Obama is indeed flexing those muscles. And not only that, he seems to have chosen an interesting place to flex it. mka quotes HuffPo:
It might not be the most glamorous hill, but it's the one that Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) has vowed to die on. President Obama, however, isn't going to give him that chance.
Well, yeah, I guess that hill may be a surprising one for Nelson to die on, but to me it's even stranger for Obama to choose that hill on which to suddenly start doing a decidedly non-bipartisan imitation of Teddy Roosevelt, after all his measured, centrist moves that have been driving the left absolutely batty for the past few weeks.
Multiple congressional sources say that congressional Democrats have decided to use reconciliation to go after student-lending subsidies, specifically to get around Nelson.
OK, reconciliation is the Dems' ultimate weapon in this Congressional session. But we know that as soon as it's used, the Party Wars are going to begin in earnest. While it seems likely, based on the history to date, that the Dems will win those wars handily, who knows what could change between now and then?
It's a risk. Why spend that massive political capital on how student loans are structured? I mean, it's not like he's creating a loan program where none existed before. He's just tightening up the efficiency of the program by a couple billion a year (peanuts -- or more precisely, peanut crumbs -- by Washington standards).
So why is this dispute the first one worth going nuclear over?
Is it possible that President Long-Range-Thinker Obama wants to highlight the efficiency that can be introduced into a system by eliminating the "middleman," so that at some point in the future there will be evidence to support the duplication of that strategy with regard to health care?
Don't get me wrong; I don't think that's what will be introduced this year (and if it somehow is introduced, it won't be because of Obama), but there was a lot of discussion here during the campaign about whether Obama is inherently opposed to single-payer, or just knows that it will have to be achieved incrementally rather than all at once. Based on his actions concerning students loans, I'm inclined to think maybe he's giving us hints of the latter.