So I got a call this evening from Organizing For America, Obama's tool for getting the grassroots involved.
The guy wanted me to make some phone calls, to push for support of the bill, because, as he said, it's still better than nothing. Since I spent almost an entire year working to get Obama elected, at great personal financial cost as I worked full time on it, unpaid, I should have been ripe for picking for one more dirty job.
Boy, did he get an earful. I said I absolutely would not make one single phone call in support of that piece of shit coming out of the senate, and that in fact I would make some phone calls to my two Democrat senators to kill the bill as it now stands.
When he asked why, I told him that this bill, as is, should be called the 2009 Great Giveaway to Insurance companies. A mandate to buy insurance, without anything to control costs, isn't going to reform a single thing. And to top it off, anything that might make the insurance companies behave in a sane manner was stripped from the bill.
I told him that I did my work, which was to first get Obama elected, and then to make tens and tens of phone calls to members of Congress, both the House and the Senate, to get them to support the strongest possible reform, namely those principles that Obama ran on.
While I was doing that, Obama was trying to make Olympia Snow happy, and totally ignoring what would make me happy. I hadn't realized that Olympia had done more work than I in getting him elected.
But the final straw was yesterday, when I heard that Rahm Emmanuel called Reid and told him to work with Lieberman. I've known for quite some time that Emmanuel doesn't care about a public option, but I do, and I thought Obama did, too. But for him to make that call, for Obama to allow him to make that call, tells me that what Joe Lieberman wants is more important to Obama than what I want.
If that's how he feels, so be it, but don't come crying to me now that the soup's spoiled and ask me to fix the pot.
Obama wanted to have it both ways, play footloose with fools like Snow and Lieberman, both of whom want to kill reform or make it totally unpalatable, and then call on us to cover for his failure to enunciate quite clearly to recalcitrant Dems that they need to toe the line.
Sorry, Mr President, you blew it. Maybe next time you'll think more about your base than you will those who simply pray for you to fail.
Maybe we should have teabagged, and then you'd have heard us.