I saw the headline very late last night and fully expected the debate to be raging here when I woke up. But, nothing on the rec list. Instead, a self-described Obamabot writes:
...if I understand [critics'] arguments correctly, President Obama's refusal to commit to veto ANY bill that doesn't contain a public option, a STRONG public option, makes him complicit in its failure if that happens.
While Sam Stein and Ryan Grim over at the Huffington Post report:
President Barack Obama is actively discouraging Senate Democrats in their effort to include a public insurance option with a state opt-out clause as part of health care reform.
Instead, according to Stein and Grim, Obama is pushing for a "trigger," which, the reporters note, "runs counter to the letter and the spirit of Obama's presidential campaign."
According to the article, the President's resistance
is not philosophical, one White House aide explained, but is a matter of political practicality. If the votes were there to pass a robust public option through the Senate, the president would be leading the charge, the aide said. But after six months of concern that it would be filibustered, the bet among Obama's aides is that Reid is now simply being too optimistic in his whip count. The trigger proposal, said Democratic aides, has long been associated with White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel.
"He's been so convinced by his political people from the beginning that we can't get a bill with a public option, he's internalized it. Even though it's now become obvious we can get a bill without selling out the public option, he's still on that path," said a top Democratic source. The White House, he said, continues to assure progressives it'll improve the bill in conference negotiations between the Senate and House, but advocates are unconvinced.
"If we're this close in the Senate and they're not helping us, I have a feeling they could screw us in the conference," said one.
Now Make Me Do It... NOT!
You are all familiar by now with the notion that, as the previously referenced diarist put it, "the president's tactic all along has been to stimulate the grassroots to rise up and be heard." The 'make me do it' tactic (if it exists) has always been strange, coming as it has on the heels of a campaign that promised to do the things it is now supposedly looking to be forced into doing. The 'letter and spirit' of the Obama campaign amount to a significant, even critical, difference between what it is occurring now and what occurred 70 odd years ago with FDR.
The progressive supplicant in the paradigmatic (if perhaps apocryphal) tale visited the oval office in order to convince the president of a position he didn't already publicly hold. So when Roosevelt replied, "I agree - Now make me do it" he was placing an appropriate burden on activists to bring about a critical mass of popular pressure. Obama, on the other hand, was elected as an expression of critical mass. Indeed: Obama was elected by identifying himself with this critical mass. Popular will for fundamental healthcare reform including a public option was overwhelmingly expressed at the polls last November. Thus, to represent the present situation by the (again, perhaps mythical) past distorts reality on an essential level.
The mantra
"It is important that you also lean on your congressmembers, so they can create and push the legislation that the president is eager to sign."
becomes farcical if indeed the President is not eager (except in a purely idealistic way) to sign the legislation he campaigned on (any more eager than he was to, say, negotiate publicly with Big Phrma). If the HuffPo report is accurate, the White House is working to counter and so nullify the public pressure it is supposedly encouraging by its fantastically subtle leadership.
Do the Right Thing
Stein and Grim present a president long ago convinced that the public option is not feasible in the Senate, regardless of what the public itself wants. Being idealistically eager to sign legislation others have staked themselves to champion may well be politically wise, but the political system requires a fundamental level of trust to operate. Political wisdom is similar to economic wisdom, in that each are ultimately dependent upon the wisdom and welfare of an encompassing ecology. When people voted for Change last November, they weren't voting for politeness, or bipartisanship, or any such superficial bullshit. They were voting for the idea of a politician devoted not to political wisdom, with all its compromises, but to the encompassing ecology of the common good. They weren't voting for someone to be ideally eager to do the right thing so long as other people risked themselves to make the right thing happen. They were voting for someone who understood that political wisdom is ultimately foolishness if the underlying social ecology, the fundamental exchange of trust, breaks down.