Dear President Obama:
You campaigned on hope, change and working together.
And that worked great for people who wanted to feel like there was cause for hope, cause to believe in change and hope for working together.
Now, a scant seven months into your presidency, it has (finally) become impossible to say that there's bipartisan work on health care reform.
More than that, it's impossible for you to pretend, for Robert Gibbs to say with a straight face, that Grassley et al. are working together on anything with Max Baucus that will approach what we'd call comprehensive health care reform.
Because as everyone including recent casualties of our health care "system" knows, the GOP is as interested in comprehensive health care reform that gives us a public option as Harry Reid is in submitting to an X-ray of where his spine should be to prove it's there.
To repeat: The Republican Party is not interested in change.
Not interested.
As in, has no desire to see.
These guys aren't even all willing to go on the record as saying you're an American citizen, period, dude. And you think they're going to work in good faith on a divisive issue?
Oh, true story!
It's only divisive on Capitol Hill and among people who get bussed in to town halls to play people who don't want a government takeover of health care -- but don't touch their Medicare, which is magically not a socialist system.
Mr. President, the Republican Party is interested in one thing:
Getting us Democrats and Liberals and progressives and other people you inspired to ... give up.
Getting us to lie down and admit defeat.
Meanwhile, the GOP is testing its new field apparatus.
What you've seen over the last several months is, I believe, nothing more than an Astroturf GOTV-style apparatus. Driven by lobbyists, who've been driving their party (and part of yours -- I'm not a Democrat) for years. But a GOTV-style effort nonetheless.
But I digress.
The point, Mr. President, is that your opposition isn't loyal to the country. It is not a loyal opposition in the sense that other countries have one. It is loyal to its lobbyists, to FOX News and to a dwindling and demographically homogeneous base.
Meanwhile, the rest of the country, which is represented by Democrats, is waiting on you to take this country by the horns and lead it.
We need leadership. Not "bipartisan solutions," which these days mean "let's just do nothing and say there wasn't political will." Not "Democrats, Republicans and independents working together."
There is no such thing in Congress right now.
No.
Such.
Thing.
Why?
Because the Republican Party isn't interested in working with you.
And the sooner you wake up and realize that -- and realize we elected YOU and threw a bunch of Republicans out of office -- the happier we will all be with our EFCA and ENDA and no DOMA or DADT and especially our KennedyCare.
Oh, and if you don't realize it?
If you continue to ignore the size of the pile of Republican ex-office holders who've accumulated over the last few years because GOP is a four-letter word in many households?
You'll be a one-term president because your own goddamn party will abandon you for someone who has some spine.
Someone who knows how to fight for what this country wants.
Because right now, I don't know what cockamammy things you're hearing, but "Republicans have good ideas on health care reform" shouldn't have been one of them as of, oh, John McCain's presidential bid.
And that ended almost a year ago.
love and kisses,
an American who couldn't get health care for less than $600 a month until he got a job that allowed him to buy health care for the low, low price of about $300 a month.