Our Fuzzy President Is About To Come Into Focus
Dan Froomkin
The Real Obama?Eventually, however, a White-House brokered deal will emerge from the back rooms. And one of two things will happen.
One possibility is that Obama, to everyone's surprise, will come out with a strong bill much like the one he promised his supporters during the campaign. It is conceivable, after all, that the reason Obama hasn't publicly issued ultimatums and twisted arms and busted heads is that he believes it's best to do those things in private -- and only when the time is truly ripe. In this scenario, which I call the Obama-as-community-organizer scenario, the community's needs are finally met, but in a way such that even those who had thwarted the people's will are allowed to save face.
The other possibility -- well, I call that one the Obama-as-pushover scenario. In this one, Obama will come out of it having given away the store -- having neither significantly improved the health-care system nor lowered its costs, but rather having created a new entitlement that primarily benefits the health insurance, pharmaceutical and hospital industries.
So far, the glimpses we've seen from behind all those closed doors suggest the latter scenario. Most significantly, late last week, first the Los Angeles Times and then the New York Times broke the news that Obama had secretly made a sweetheart deal with former arch-nemesis Billy Tauzin, head of Big PhRMA. The same man who during his presidential campaign so ardently pledged to let Medicare negotiate prescription-drug prices with pharmaceutical companies, has now apparently agreed to block any Congressional efforts to do that -- or anything else that would rein in the industry's obscene profits, for that matter -- all in return for $80 billion in promised cost savings over 10 years and, it turns out, an $150 million ad campaign in support of "reform" efforts.
If the health-care deal that emerges benefits the health care industry more than it does ordinary Americans, Obama is likely to argue that the agreement was by necessity a compromise. But keep in mind that Obama went into the entire debate having taken a fairly dramatic compromise position to start with. The most effective way to achieve universal coverage and bring down health care costs - Obama's two ostensible holy grails -- is, of course, a single-payer system. But Obama unilaterally ruled out creating an actual government-run health-care system - rather than a mythological one -- on pragmatic political grounds, before the public debate even began.
Does Obama have the ability to stand up to corporate interests? There's scant evidence of that so far. Indeed, most notably in the course of the financial industry bailout, he deferred to them quite spectacularly. And it's not just corporate interests, either. There's something about the military/national security complex that seems to set Obama back on his heels on such issues as dealing with Guantanamo detainees, coming clean about the Bush administration's torture legacy or "Don't Ask Don't Tell."
Yes, despite an occasional commitment to open government, the White House remains largely a black box. We know some of the inputs - including a surprising number of health industry titans and veritable parade of other CEOs. By contrast, the "voice of the people" seems to be expressed mostly by the ten miserable letters from ordinary Americans that Obama reads every day. Doesn't exactly seem like an even match.
But we still don't know what really happens inside. Is the real Obama being serially co-opted by his aides in there? Or is the real Obama at heart a conflict-averse facilitator, rather than a leader?
We'll know a lot more soon enough.
More at..........
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/08/10/our-fuzzy-president-is-ab_n_255524.html?view=print
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