From the insightful Moyers interview with Robert Kuttner and Matt Taibbi:
MOYERS: If you were Barack Obama, in a city that's overrun by money, how would you try to fix it?
KUTTNER: I would go over the heads of the special interests to the people. I think there's a lot of sullen apprehension, frustration, out in the country, and I think the people are hungry for leadership - he's not doing that sufficiently.
TAIBBI: It's absolutely a political winner for the President to hit Wall Street very hard and do all the things that he's supposed to be doing right now - all the things that FDR did. If he did those things, if he remade Wall Street in the way that it neeeds to be remade, he would do nothing but gain popularity and I think that's the strategy he should've pursued.
Cue dream sequence...
I was so happy when I woke up this morning and came to Daily Kos to find everyone celebrating that the Senate had passed a Health Care Reform bill with a strong public option and real measures to control costs and stop the trend of ever-increasing prices and premiums (and health industry profits).
I thought back to the day earlier this year when President Obama introduced his health care legislation to the American people and clearly laid out why the public option and the cost control measures were so important to make this reform work. At the time, some people said the President was making a mistake by coming out so forcefully for these strong measures.
And in fact, the health insurance companies did immediately come out guns ablazing in an all-out effort to kill the health reform legislation (knowing that it would limit their profits). Over the summer, their barrage of TV ads and astroturf campaigns, combined with rightwingers screaming "SOCIALISM" at town hall meetings all across the country, started to undermine the public's enthusiasm for health reform. Luckily, that's when the President took action.
He went to Charlotte, and Cleveland, and Louisiana, and he made the case for the health care reform bill. He talked to regular people and he shared their stories to demonstrate how broken the current system is and why cost controls and a public option were so necessary to fix the system for average Americans.
And the tide started to turn in his favor. The media began pointing out the health insurance industry's efforts to kill reform and investigating all the money they were spending on ads and astroturf campaigns to kill the legislation. As time went on, the more the health insurance companies tried to kill health care reform, the more popular health care reform became - and the more popular President Obama became.
Now, with the legislation all but signed, his popularity has never been higher and people believe he is looking out for them during these tough times. But the real turning point was when the President took his "listening tour" to Nebraska and Connecticut and Maine, and urged his supporters to organize in these states to pressure their Senators to support the bill.
In Connecticut, their was such a strong backlash against Senator Lieberman for appearing to side with the industry that cash and volunteers flowed into the grassroots efforts to support health reform. In the end, Lieberman had no choice but to support the bill in the face of such overwhelming support for it from his constituents.
So today, with Republicans discouraged and demoralized, and with the President likely getting to sign the health care reform bill before Christmas, I am very thankful indeed...
Ah, yaaaawn.. Oh, what? Wait, you mean, I just woke up? I was dreaming? None of that actually happened? Oh...... Darn.