I find this entire health care debate to be tiring. This is how it all tends to play out:
- The Obama administration says/does something that makes a lot of people wary that he will fight for the public option
- There is outrage and confusion afterward
- The White House walks back whatever was said and says "nothing has changed"
- The rec list here on DKos alternates between the "OMG, Obama is selling us out" and the "STFU, Obama's got this handled" crowd.
- Rinse and repeat.
It's tiring. I've come to the conclusion that there are pretty much 3 types of people involved in these debates:
- The ones that want to believe Obama is always right, and we need to just have faith in him and give him time without complaint (or with the bare minimum of complaing)
- The ones who are skeptical of Obama and his administration and are starting to (or already) feel more than a little disillusioned with him and his ability to handle this
- The people who vacillate between the other two groups or fall in the middle.
I'm in group 3. I like to believe that the Obama administration is infallible sometimes, and that he's got this all worked out and he's just setting up to go in for the kill because for some reason he likes to be the phoenix rising from the ashes and everything will be alright. Other times, I don't think Obama is going to do what he promised in the campaign because it's not politically expedient and other signs in the administration. It's tiring, confusing and frustrating.
All I want is Candidate Obama, the one who promised that even if he wasn't always right, and even if we didn't always agree with him, we'd always know what he was thinking. During the campaign I just knew that we could trust him to always do the right thing. I don't think there was anything in his platform that I strongly disagreed with. Since the inauguration, I've been more than skeptical on a few issues, and I'm almost to the point where I don't trust anything he says at all when it comes to health care.
I think if the WH wasn't playing so many games here and being careless with their messaging we wouldn't have to continue the cycle mentioned above. We'd all be secure in the knowledge that he not only wants a public option, but thinks it's essential to health care and is willing to fight for it. They float out trial balloons, those balloons get popped by the progressives and other proponents of health care reform, then they try to walk the comment back. How many times have we had to deal with that now?
The messaging was lost on health care almost as soon as Congress went on recess. We've basically spent the last month fighting stupid rumors about "death panels" and other BS that has nothing to do with health care. There is no bill, so everyone is throwing out everything that could possibly happen based on the limited information we are able to get (so much for transparency) about what's going on with the process of crafting these plans.
Sure, Obama often lands on his feet after these "scuffles" be it in the campaign or in dealing with Congress. He hasn't had a huge loss yet. That doesn't mean he's incapable of losing. I'm not necessarily saying that he's going to lose the health care debate, but how much time and energy is wasted because someone goes off message or says something that riles up the "left"? Or because we failed to stop the RW talking points before they spread like wildfire? I think Jon Stewart nailed it last night:
They sold us a WAR we didn't even really WANT, and we can't manage to sell health care (insurance) reform that every sane person wants? That's not right.
So all in all, what I'm trying to say is I'm tired of this crap, and I'm frustrated, and I'm tired of us fighting with each other over what Obama is/isn't doing because we don't know what the hell is going on.
If you read this thanks.
Update [2009-8-18 17:8:35 by Muzikal203]: There are a lot of suggestions for a group 4, one of which is the "wait and seers" I tend to put them in group 1 in my mind. I didn't forget about you guys! :o) But I can see how they could be in a separate group. I'm a little bit of a wait and seer because there is no bill yet, but on the other hand I don't think we should necessarily wait for a bill because by then it may be really too late to do anything about it. Does that make sense?
Also slightly edited the group descriptions to try to make it a bit more clear on what I think (hey, I did tell ya'll that I'm confused as hell ~lol~)