...and he's made his position abundantly clear: He absolutely supports a capitalist for-profit model of corporate governance in banking and insurance, and he insists upon smaller government.
President Obama will not preside over creative destruction of a huge corporate insurance marketplace and simultaneously create the world's largest new government entitlement.
This front-page story, from mcjoan, was up for twenty minutes this morning, and she is absolutely correct in her conclusions.
I offer my humble theories and explanations below only in order to prompt you to CALL YOUR ELECTEDs!
We must keep up the pressure on our democratically elected representatives.
What President Obama does not see - or he refuses to see - or he is denial - or his advisers mislead him - and/or, certainly what he refuses to say publicly - is that the problems that banking, Wall Street finance and insurance face REQUIRE change - but he has not chastised them enough for their failures. Thus, they conceitedly brag very publicly and flaunt their success and their bonuses.
At a time when banking and health insurance have become irresponsible - criminal in abnegation of their own corporate charters - when their CEO's have become tantamount to outlaws raping and pillaging and killing their own customers through un-insurance - all for enhanced shareholder value - the first Black or African American - and certainly the most Progressive politician to have ever crossed the threshold of the White House - pushes on all the levers he can ...to maintain the status quo... because the alternative - a destruction of capitalism - is truly frightening.
I don't know what he tells CEO's privately, but he better tell the truth to the American people. That's 'messaging' I could believe in. And complexity in the explanation of a for-profit perversity whose miasma reaches the very sky above us all is no vice.
In the Senate, the artifice of some requirement that there be 60 votes for legislation to pass is a bald-faced and un-democratic lie. It's mock-politics, pseudo-politics, but it is not leadership, not governance and not responsibility.
The pressure on Senate Dems for real reform - single-payer - has been intense. Of course single-payer, Medicare-For-All is the enduring and perfect solution, but Democrats do not want to be the party that failed to do this real reform and simultaneously be blamed for enshrining and BAILING OUT the extremely flawed for-profit insurance model. For this, they need Republicans, and Repugs obstruct and refuse to play ball.
This puts Dems in a position where they can only cede some of their extraordinary majority and lose some seats in order to appear to share the blame and complicity with Republicans.
Witness the kabuki of President Obama's endorsement of a Cadillac tax in a region that has been sensitized to increased costs during President Obama's own campaign - and then he marches into town almost to defy the voters to vote for Coakley. Witness the feckless Coakley campaign, snubbing voters, refusing to shake hands and unable to properly acknowledge the Socks on a sports program. That was outrageously bad political theater. A 31% lead doesn't turn into a 35% reversal without the outright manipulation we witnessed.
He ran on "CHANGE YOU CAN BELIEVE IN." But 'better messaging' is insufficient to convince me that change is a-comin' - and I fear that it will lead to defeats just like we saw in MA, and in VA & and in NJ. Maybe that's by design, too, for substantive reform will not be forthcoming. And perhaps President Obama, too, needs Republicans to take some of the blame.
He doesn't own these problems yet - not by a long shot, but he seems to have a problem explaining just how badly a Bush-led government and our corporations have failed us and corrupted our corporate institutions.
They only call it class war when we fight back! Keep calling your Congressmen and Senators and demand change. The only way we win is by keeping up the unremitting pressure.
Do not do not do not do not do not do not do not do not do not do not do not do not do not do not do not get cynical! That is certainly the way to defeat, and the Democratic Party that we have is full of bad political actors, but Democrats are most certainly better than the party of worse that we had for 8 long years.