bottom up change

Continuing the family theme from my last post, in my family we have a list of quirky sayings that my dad likes to repeat, and they have become classic phrases that my sister and I frequently joke about.  One of them always comes when our dad is about to tell us a hard truth that we’d rather not hear: “I hate to say it, but…”  This phrase has been on my mind lately in reference to President Obama’s performance on health care reform.  I hate to say it, Mr. President, but you’re not getting the job done.  I know you think I’m just wringing my hands and getting “wee-wee’d up,” but we’ve been here before in the summer of 2007 and the summer of 2008 when you were performing miserably during the campaign.  There certainly is something about August inside the Obama camp.  Maybe the heat makes everyone lazy.

Last week I wrote about the shortcomings in the pro-reform organizing I’ve observed in comparison to the way that right-wingers have effectively gotten attention and shifted the momentum on the debate as a result of their town hall disruptions.  But today I want to put some of the blame for the declining support for health care reform on Barack Obama and his team in the White House.  As someone who has supported Obama from the beginning of his campaign for president, it’s tough to be critical on this issue.  I delayed my educational plans for a year to work on his campaign.  I supported him in part because I thought he would be effective at building support in the nation for health care reform.  His powers of communication, intelligence, and decency convinced me that he could be an effective advocate for health care reform.  But something has gone very wrong over the past few months.

Before I go any further, I should say that I still believe that a solid health care reform bill is going to pass this year.  The Democrats simply have too great a majority in the House and the Senate for them to get nothing done.  It also seems that Obama is willing to pass a bill without bipartisan support, relying on Democrats alone if necessary.  That’s the good news.  The bad news is that the White House, President Obama, and OFA have not done a good enough job organizing and selling the public option to the American people.  Nor have they effectively countered the lies and confusion being spread at the town hall meetings and on Fox News.  As a result, it now seems obvious to me that the public option will not pass.  If the alternative idea of “co-ops” passes, it will not be an effective competitor with the private insurance market.  The powerful insurance lobby and their ground troops at the town halls have effectively scared enough Americans about the public option to ensure that it won’t happen.  So we will have an improvement to our health care system as a result of the legislation that does pass, but not nearly what supporters of Barack Obama were hoping for when they volunteered for him and worked for him.

Like many other progressives, my frustration with the President’s recent performance went to a new level recently, when administration officials seemed to back away from a commitment to the public option.  But this only confirmed that something was up in the White House after President Obama himself seemed to diminish the importance of the public option at a town hall meeting in Colorado last Saturday.  He said:

All I’m saying is, though, that the public option, whether we have it or we don’t have it, is not the entirety of health care reform.  This is just one sliver of it, one aspect of it.

Obama is surely right when he says that the public option is not the entirety of health care reform.  But to say that it is just “one sliver of it” is just appeasement to the people who are trying to make health care Obama’s “Waterloo”, as Sen. Jim Demint (R-SC) bluntly put it last month.  Whether or not the public option is essential to health care reform is not the main point.  By giving his opponents the sense that they are winning this fight President Obama crossed the line from pragmatism into weakness.  Those who want to kill health care reform now smell blood, and will likely become even more aggressive in the weeks to come.  Perhaps it would have been necessary to concede on the public option later, after the August recess, when Congress reconvenes.  But to walk back this commitment right now is the worst political move that I have seen this White House play since Obama took office in January.

President Obama has tried to reassure progressives who were outraged by his apparent concession of the public option this weekend.  In a forum organized by OFA yesterday, Obama argued that the controversy with the left was somewhat “manufactured” because he still believes that a public option is the best way to lower health care costs.  But during this forum he never stated that the public option is a must.  He didn’t threaten to veto a bill unless it contained the public option.  Here were his words:

Now, my point is — this is sort of like the belt-and-suspenders concept to keep up your pants. You know, the insurance reforms are the belt. The public option can be the suspenders. And what we’re trying to just suggest to people is, is that all these things are important and that if the debate ends up being focused on just one aspect of it, then we’re missing the boat. If all we’re talking about is the public option, then the 80 percent of the American people who already have health insurance in the private insurance market, they say to themselves, “Well, what’s in it for me?” Their attitude will be, “This is not relevant to me.”

As a justification for downplaying the role of the public option in the White House’s arguments for health care reform, this is a pretty clear rationale: the White House is scared of Republicans trying to make it seem like Obama is pushing for a government takeover of health care.  But this is exactly the problem.  Instead of acting from a position of strength, which the President had just a few months ago, the Obama administration is acting from a position of weakness, seeking to quiet the debate on one of the largest parts of the plan.

Barack Obama and his team have made major mistakes and lost their message before and yet figured out how to come back from them before all was lost.  They know how to recalibrate and get back on their game.  But I’m convinced that the errors and timidity shown this summer have done enough damage to the health care reform debate that the public option is a lost cause.  Obama has proven me and many others wrong before, of course, so maybe he will do so again.  But time is running out.

This is just an addendum to my last post about the surprising number of Americans who believe the falsehoods about health care reform being spread by the tea baggers.  I just returned from San Diego, CA where I was visiting my grandparents and some friends.  At one point I overheard my grandma talking with my grandpa about how she had heard on TV that the government was going to start reducing medical care for seniors to save money.  They were in the living room while I was in the kitchen.  I walked into the living room and my grandpa looked up at me and said jokingly, “Well, they want to get rid of us.  We’ve lived too long.  The government doesn’t want us around anymore.”  I laughed but had to tell them that there was nothing about health care reform that would harm them or any other seniors and that people trying to kill the reform effort were lying to seniors to scare them.  I think they were persuaded by my rebuttal, but it was insightful to see firsthand how the rumors and lies that are being spread on television are worrying senior citizens in particular.

By slamming one of his own constituents for comparing President Obama to Hitler and health care reform to Nazi practices, Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) has become one of the heroes of progressives in the health care debate in recent days.   Here is the footage:

Best line: “Ma’am, trying to have a conversation with you would be like trying to argue with a dining room table, I have no interest in doing it.”  I don’t know why it took so long for a Democrat to finally call out one of these people in this way.  Frank’s rebuttal to this woman is effective because he refuses to even argue with her “vile, contemptible, nonsense”, but he also notes that it is a “tribute to the first amendment” that she is able to speak her mind.  This is exactly how more Democrats should respond to the outrageous lies being spread by the townhall tea baggers.  President Obama cannot speak like Rep. Frank did, but it is noteworthy that just yesterday Obama took a more aggressive tone to those who are spreading the “death panels” lie in a conference call with religious leaders.  Democrats need to follow Barney Frank’s lead and push back in stronger terms against the lies that are starting to have a significant impact on the debate.   As Chris Cilizza reports, a recent NBC News poll found that nearly half of the country believe that government officials will make decisions on the health care of seniors (the death panel fabrication) while over half of the population believe the falsehood that health insurance will be made available to illegal immigrants.

Progressives need to be more creative in their organizing around health care. A look back at the civil rights movement may be instructive.

I’ve been supportive of Organizing for America since its inception–even before we knew what it would be called.  But the sad fact is that on the biggest progressive organizing test of 2009–the health care reform push–OFA and its allies have thus far been out-organized by a bunch of obnoxious, loud, in some cases crazy, but very well-motivated citizens on the right.  The angry town hall meetings over the past few weeks is a sign that all the passion, or at least all the talent for making the news, lies with opponents of reform.  The fact that the media has focused so intensely on the anger among opponents of reform is a major loss for President Obama and OFA.

Some on the left may disagree with me that the scenes of anger at the town halls represent a loss for the President and OFA.  These town halls, they would counter, are “astroturf”, since they are sponsored by special interests and do not represent a large section of the public.  It’s probably true that the people screaming at their representatives and senators are a fringe group of conservatives, and it is true that some special interests are sponsoring the protests.  But it does not follow that these protests are therefore artificial or staged.  People are choosing to show up at these town halls en masse, and their anger seems genuine to me.  Indeed, in numbers and in motivation, the grassroots energy seems stronger on the right at the present time than it does on the left, regardless of who is organizing these people.

Last week I became aware of an incident that confirmed for me that progressives have a serious problem because of these town hall meetings.  I received an email describing how supporters of health care reform were overwhelmed by loud, jeering opponents at a town hall in Chelmsford, Massachusetts for Rep. Niki Tsongas (D-MA).  The OFA chapter in Massachusetts had tried to send supporters of health care reform to this meeting, but the breakdown of the pro-reform versus anti-reform groups was about 40-60, according to this email.  Apparently, the jeering of the anti-reform group was so loud that the pro-reform group didn’t stand a chance, and wouldn’t have even if the numbers were more even.  The fact that conservatives showed up in greater numbers and were drowning out the voices of OFA’s people in Massachusetts is a disturbing sign.  This piece describing Ben Cardin’s (D-MD) experience in the Democratic stronghold of Maryland is another example of how even in strongly blue states progressives are being outmaneuvered by conservatives at the grassroots level on the health care issue.  (For what it’s worth, I have lived in both Maryland and Massachusetts so I know that there are a lot of Republicans in both states.  My point is simply that in both states Republicans are vastly outnumbered by Democrats who could have shown up in larger numbers than they did.)

Last week, Paul Krugman wrote about the “town hall mob” mentality that has spread around the country.  His argument was that the kind of anger we are seeing against health care reform among some conservatives isn’t just a normal disagreement about policy.  Instead, according to Krugman, there is an element of unease that some people in this country have about a black President, and this unease is showing up in the town halls.  There may be some of this going on, and the whole “birther” movement is a sign that something deeply irrational is spreading among a segment of the Republican base.  However, President Bill Clinton was the victim of very bizarre rumors as well during his administration, and if we are honest, progressives will admit that there were wild conspiracy theories floating among their ranks during the Bush administration.  There was also a lot of hatred and anger.  The cause of the vitriol doesn’t matter so much as the result, it seems to me.  In his piece, Krugman wrote something that I believe is more important and insightful to the current debate about health care:

But right now Mr. Obama’s backers seem to lack all conviction, perhaps because the prosaic reality of his administration isn’t living up to their dreams of transformation. Meanwhile, the angry right is filled with a passionate intensity.

And if Mr. Obama can’t recapture some of the passion of 2008, can’t inspire his supporters to stand up and be heard, health care reform may well fail.

It’s not exactly a surprise that this kind of deflation in intensity among Obama’s supporters would happen.  Many people who volunteered and voted for Barack Obama are disappointed with the details they are hearing about the various health care reform proposals that have been passing through the various committees in Congress.  Some people strongly prefer a single-payer system, and believe that the legislation that Democrats are currently considering amounts to nothing but a half-measure that will not solve our health care problems.  Another group of progressives is more willing to settle for the so-called “public option”, but let’s face it, Krugman is right: there does not appear to be a lot of enthusiasm for this approach among Barack Obama’s base.

So what should progressives who care about the fate of health insurance reform do?  Two things are necessary, I believe.  One lesson learned from this summer is that while door knocking and phone banking may be good field tactics during an election, they are lousy methods for organizing around legislation.  OFA has been recruiting volunteers this summer to call supporters of President Obama in order to encourage them to call or write their representatives or senators and encourage them to support health care reform.  Why is this strategy doomed?  Well, we already know why: while volunteers have been making calls and knocking on doors, conservatives have been reaching a far larger audience through the mass media with their theatrics at town hall meetings.  In other words, the conservative strategy has been much more efficient at getting the anti-reform message out to a mass audience.  The images on CNN showing conservatives screaming at their representatives will create doubt among some independents and encourage other conservatives to take action such as calls to their representatives.  On the other side, the number of phone calls and door knocks that progressives can make is limited to the number of volunteers who show up, and the disparity of intensity means that not enough will show up.  So, the tactics of progressives need to change.  Supporters of health insurance reform need to get more creative in their tactics and aim for mass media exposure.    Perhaps a massive rally, a march, or a national sit-in is needed.  Let’s look back to the methods of the civil rights movement to borrow some of their tactics.  Whatever peacefully gains a national media audience and shows that there are a lot of people in the country who want reform to happen.  Progressives need to also think about distinguishing themselves from conservatives by looking like the rational actors in this debate.  If they can make their case for health care reform calmly and like adults, perhaps that will be an effective way to sway more Americans.

But the second lesson we’ve learned is Krugman’s point about passion.  If progressives do not care as much about passing health care reform as conservatives care about stopping it, then as Krugman says, “health care reform may well fail.”  I don’t know what anyone can do to increase the level of passion and engagement among President Obama’s supporters.  Perhaps Obama could do a better job getting people “fired up,” as we used to say.  But grassroots supporters of President Obama have a responsibility here as well.  If we cannot muster enough support for this bill among other progressives, then we do not deserve to win this fight.  In that case, maybe there isn’t enough support in the nation for health care reform after all.

The advantage that Democrats still have, of course, lies in their superior numbers in Congress compared to the Republicans.  But math isn’t enough.  A little more intensity, wider engagement among Obama’s supporters, and better tactics by those who care strongly about health care reform may be just what is needed.  A lot depends on the White House, OFA, and the grassroots supporters of reform learning the correct lessons from this summer.  I believe that if we do learn the right lessons, then the fall will be the time when we rebound from the setbacks of July and August.