Health Reform Has Crossed the Crossroads

There's so many stories coming out about health reform that the relentless spinning is making everybody's head spin. My own sense continues to be that the Obama administration and the Congressional Democrats are going to pass health reform legislation with a public option this year. I don't know whether Arlen Specter is right in claiming that there are 60 votes to bring a public option plan to a vote if the GOP throws up a filibuster. But I wouldn't be surprised if he was. I also don't know if it's going to be a straight public option, a public option with a mechanism allowing red states to opt out, or a public option with a trigger to go in effect if the health insurance companies continue to conduct their business in a predatory manner. Today's flavor is a public option with an opt out for the benefit of moderate and conservative Democrats who want to hide behind the idea of "choice." However, momentum can shift quickly and I think there's a slightly better chance that the final legislation will contain a straight public option.

My own preference is that the public option be adopted as national legislation. The weakness of the "opt out" is that the states likely to take it are states like Texas and South Carolina that have large minority populations and even larger white populations determined to screw minorities as much as possible. Allowing these states to opt out of the pulbic option is monumentally unfair to large group of working poor among the Hispanic and African-American population. It's unfair to the working white people who can't afford health insurance as well. The politics of a nullification state like South Carolina might militate against accepting a public option, but that doesn't mean that the higher numbers of working poor people in these states should not get the same benefits as people in a wealthy state like Connecticut or Illinois.

But if the public option with opt out is adopted, I believe that it would be politically beneficial to the Democrats. The reason for this is that the acceptance or rejection of the public option would be a powerful wedge dividing the Republicans. This could be seen with the fate of the stimulus package in South Carolina and Alaska. Teaparty governors like Mark Sanford and Sarah Palin wanted to reject stimulus money but this led to howls of outrage among orthodox Republicans in state legislators who wanted the money and were willing to fight their governors over the issue. Health reform is even more unpopular with the teaparty folks and the conflicts among Republicans over opting out would be even nastier. As the fight over Dede Scozzafava in New York's 23rd District shows, the teaparty faction is determined to eliminate moderates from the Republican Party. If a public option "opt out" passes, the teaparty folks are going to start going after "sissy conservatives" as well.

Teaparty activism is part of the dynamic among the Democrats as well. That sound everyone hears in Washington these days is Democratic backbones snapping into place. No one would know this from reading the "progressive media" which over-dramatizes every twist and turn from potential "turncoats" like Ben Nelson, Blanche Lincoln, and Mary Landrieu. But the Democratic and membership in the Senate and House have responded to the Teaparty Movement by tuning out the right-wing. Ben Nelson desperately wants to vote for something Olympia Snowe can support, but Snowe and Susan Collins have become practically the only Republicans on the Democratic radar. When Republican senators like Charles Grassley started going along with the "death panel" lie, the Democrats began to ignore them. People like Nelson and Kent Conrad still have loyalties to the insurance companies, but the Republicans haven't given them anything credible to consider and Democrats in general have closed ranks with the intent of negotiating something among themselves.

The teaparty movement has bee successful in generating grass-roots conservative opposition to health reform, but disgust over tea-party rhetoric among the Democrats has solidified support for large-scale health reform and guaranteed that the public option is going to be passed in some form. America owes the teabaggers a big thank you. As a result of revulsion over the teaparty movement, health reform has "crossed the crossroads" and is on its way to approval.

The Progressive Media Fails on Obama's Speech

This is another in what looks like a series of posts complaining about the problems of the progressive media in covering the Obama administration.

I'm going to start with a quote from HuffPost's Dan Froomkin worrying about upcoming coverage of the health reform debate from the mainstream media.

The biggest challenge for Obama at this point, however, is the press. Will his speech be a game-changer as far as the coverage is concerned? Last night's triumphant visuals, including wildly cheering Democrats, and the resulting instapolls certainly proved a change of pace from the angry town-halls and barrage of lunacy that so transfixed our elite reporters during August. But the question is actually less whether the tenor of the coverage will change than whether the media will take this occasion to engage -- even just a little bit -- in a serious examination of the issues. Chances are, of course, that the vast majority of the coverage will continue to focus obsessively on politics and process -- and on the next conflict, the next gun-toting whacko, and the next spectacular bit of disinformation. That wouldn't be good for Obama -- or for the nation.

But where is the mainstream media going to go for their stories about Rep. Joseph Wilson yelling at Obama, the "next gun-toting whacko," or the next set of bizarre comments from Michael Steele--Instapundit? Rush Limbaugh? Fox News? Why bother. Such conservative sources will have at least some discussion of whether yelling "liar" at President Obama is a reasonable thing to do or carrying guns to Obama rallies is a good way for conservatives to dissent. Translating all of that into the desired "food fight" between the Obama administration and the right wing would be too much work for the mainstream media. Why should intellectually lazy mainstream media types bother.

That's especially the case because the mainstream media can draw its stories on right-wing antics from HuffPost. It's 10:58pm Eastern Standard time. Let's see what HuffPost has up right now. For their headline, they have a picture of Rep. Joseph Wilson of "you lie" fame along with four articles on the Joe Wilson story. Anybody reading HuffPost tonight--including the sheep-like mainstream media--would reasonably conclude that the most important thing about President Obama's speech as a political event was Joe Wilson's outburst. Not Obama's arguments concerning why health reform is necessary, his criticism of skyrocketing medical costs, Obama's attempt to pose himself as a moderate manuevering between "progressives" and "conservatives," or even his stories about seriously ill patients having their health insurance pulled. Instead of following up on the poor people who have died because of the inhumanity of the insurance companies, HuffPost decided to make Rep. Joe Wilson just as famous as Joe the Plumber.

It gets worse. Almost immediately below the headline is a story about Glenn Beck--I'm sorry two stories about Glenn Beck right below a picture of Glenn Beck. So far, we have pictures of Joe Wilson and Glenn Beck on what might have been considered a big day for Barack Obama and the health care debate. I had to push my "PgDn" button three times before I got to a picture of Obama and the picture of Obama makes him look thin and small compared to the full exposure given Joe Wilson. Progressives at HuffPost and TPM have been complaining all day that Republicans like Joe Wilson did not show proper respect for Obama and intimated that they were at least partly motivated by racism. And I think they're right. But treating Joe Wilson as though he's more important than Obama isn't much of a way to show respect for Obama either.

Scrolling down on Huffpost, there's at least three more stories about Joe Wilson, another story about the California politician who resigned after some pornographic bragging about his (alleged) affairs, and Jane Hamsher criticizing Obama. Compared to the wall coverage of Joe Wilson, the progressive HuffPost only has three articles by Froomkin, Maxine Waters, and Paul Begala praising Obama and commenting a little on the substance of his views. In other words, HuffPost is practically a warehouse for stories on the state of the right-wing antics and relatively little coverage to the speech itself. And even then, a considerable amount of HuffPost's coverage of the speech is about polling and the politics of the moderate, progressive split among congressional Democrats. Dan Froomkin complains about the lack of policy substance in the mainstream media, but it's not like HuffPost is any better. And given that HuffPost "rules the world" of the mainstream media more than Drudge, HuffPost has become a significant source of the problem for the mainstream media as well.

And it's not just HuffPost. Talking Points Media features a big picture of Joe Wilson with smaller pictures of Dick Armey and John Boehner. Altogether I count eight stories on Joe Wilson and only three stories on Obama's speech (concerning Tom Harkin, Ron Wyden, and Joe Biden). And even those stories are more than balanced by other stories about Michael Steele, Mark Sanford, and California sex-bragger Mark Duvall. If a Democratic politician really wanted to be featured on TPM or HuffPost, the best thing they could do would be to start seeing prostitutes or go one better than Mark Sanford and have an affair with an exotic Brazilian beauty. Maybe President Obama could get more coverage in the progressive media if he filed for divorce.

To be fair, Salon featured a positive column about Obama's speech from Joan Walsh even though it still ran more articles about the Republican reaction.

All in all, the big-time progressive media has its head firmly up its butt about Obama's speech, the health care debate, and health care policy. As bad as the mainstream media is, the progressive media doesn't have a lot of room to criticize.