Subject: Re: from the New York Times
Ted,
Certainly every "reform" program has had to undergo back room deals. What price did Americans of Color pay because Roosevelt was forced to play ball with the Dixicrats?
Perhaps as time goes by, the Obama Health Care will be modified to a place where it really lives up to its name. In its present toothless form it is merely Hope Deferred.
Carl Jarvis
----- Original Message -----From: ted chittendenSent: Saturday, June 30, 2012 9:42 AMSubject: Re: from the New York TimesCarl:
One of the terrible truths that few on this list are willing to face is that if those backroom deals with the insurance industry hadn't occurred, there most likely would not have been any health care reform at all.
--
Ted Chittenden
Every story has at least two sides if not more.
---- Carl Jarvis <carjar82@gmail.com> wrote:
I'll need to read this again and think about it. At first blush, I don't
see Obama's health reform in the same league as Roosevelt's Social Security,
or Johnson's Medicare. There were too many backroom deals that watered down
and enriched the Health Privateeers.
Carl Jarvis
----- Original Message -----
From: alice dampman humel
To: blind democracy List
Sent: Friday, June 29, 2012 7:39 PM
Subject: from the New York Times
A Vindication, With a Legacy Still Unwritten.
By MARK LANDLER. WASHINGTON -- For Barack Obama, who staked his
presidency on a once-in-a-generation reshaping of the social
welfare system, the Supreme Court's health care ruling is not
just political vindication. It is a personal reprieve, leaving
intact his hopes of joining the ranks of Franklin D. Roosevelt,
Lyndon B. Johnson and Ronald Reagan as presidents who
fundamentally altered the course of the country.
For all its weight, however, the judgment does little to settle
the bitter debate, spanning decades, over the proper role of
government in American life. That debate rages on, with the next
acid test only four months away -- an election that will give
voters the chance to render their verdict on Mr. Obama's
ambitious legacy.
What the Supreme Court's decision does do is preserve Mr. Obama's
status as the president who did more to expand the nation's
safety net than any since Johnson. It preserves a bill intended
to push back against rapidly rising income inequality. And for a
self-consciously historic figure, it allows Mr. Obama to argue
that he has delivered on the most cherished goal of his 2008
campaign: 'Change we can believe in.
Historians will compare this to F.D.R.'s Social Security and
Lyndon Johnson's Medicare,' said the historian Robert Dallek, who
has written about both presidents. This is another step in
humanizing the American industrial system.
In political terms, said Douglas G. Brinkley, a professor of
history at Rice University, 'It's the cornerstone of what could
turn out to be one of the most extraordinary two-term
presidencies in American history.
Beyond his legislative agenda -- not just on health care, but on
education and Wall Street regulation -- Mr. Obama has sketched
out a view of government as a force for good, a great leveler and
a protector of the middle class. That view stands in stark
contrast to the Republican mantra, articulated by Reagan, who
headed in the opposite direction in his first inaugural address,
saying that 'government is not the solution to our problem;
government is the problem.
Republicans, including the president's challenger, Mitt Romney,
have largely hewed to the Reagan script in the decades since, and
have met with considerable success doing so. Polls show
continuing skepticism of government -- especially of the health
law -- and Republicans captured the House of Representatives in
2010 with a small-government message.
But Mr. Obama has constructed his political career on the notion
that Americans are ready for something different after three
decades of rising inequality and slow-growing incomes for the
middle class. While still a candidate in 2008, Mr. Obama declared
that Reagan changed history more than either Bill Clinton or
Richard M. Nixon. The planets, he said, were once again aligned
to make a transformative presidency possible.
The Republican approach, I think, has played itself out,' he said
to the editorial board of The Reno Gazette-Journal.
Health care has been Exhibit A in that argument, a project he
undertook at the cost of other ambitious efforts like curbing
climate change or rewriting the tax code. While Mr. Obama will be
remembered for bailing out the auto industry, winding down two
wars and dispatching Osama bin Laden, health care was his play
for history.
Not just Roosevelt and Johnson, but Harry S. Truman, Nixon and
Mr. Clinton all tried and failed to move the country toward
universal health coverage. Mr. Obama and the Democratic leaders
on Capitol Hill succeeded, passing a bill that, through an
expansion of private and government insurance, seeks to end the
status of the United States as the world's only rich country with
millions of involuntarily uninsured citizens.
Health care has been a squabble without end since the beginning
of the progressive era, since Theodore Roosevelt,' Professor
Brinkley said.
In addition to broadening the safety net, the law also seeks to
alter a tax structure largely created by Reagan. To pay for the
expanded insurance, Mr. Obama and Congress raised Medicare taxes
on high-income households, as well as on medical companies.
We've entered an era of zero-sum trade-offs, and Obama is trying
to dramatize those trade-offs,' said Theda Skocpol, a professor
of government at Harvard. The health care law really symbolizes
that; it's a really redistributionist law.
Had the justices struck down the law, they would have dealt Mr.
Obama a crippling blow in the midst of a hard-fought campaign.
Knocking down the central pillar of his legislative agenda would
have called into question not only his judgment, but his very
legitimacy, according to the presidential scholar Michael
Beschloss.
Mr. Obama briefly found himself contemplating that fate just
after 10 on Thursday morning as he watched live coverage of the
ruling on a bank of television screens outside the Oval Office.
Two cable TV networks, CNN and Fox News, erroneously reported
that the court had struck down part of the law, before correcting
themselves.
If Mr. Obama and his opponents can agree on one thing, it may be
that he is trying to move the country away from a laissez-faire
period. The rise of the Tea Party movement and the Republican
takeover of the House were a backlash against what his opponents
saw as an arrogant overreach by the president. The fact that he
did it while the country was mired in a recession, and without a
single Republican vote, compounded the outrage.
That changed the entire tenor of politics,' said Sean Wilentz, a
professor of history at Princeton. It took a while for the White
House to figure out that post-partisanship didn't fit the
realities of Washington. They may have misjudged the political
situation.
More broadly, Mr. Obama may have misjudged the readiness of the
country to accept an expansion of the government after decades in
which Reagan's conservative credo had come to be embraced, even
by Democrats like Mr. Clinton, who declared in 1996 that 'the era
of big government is over.
As Steven F. Hayward, an expert in the presidency at the American
Enterprise Institute, pointed out, Mr. Obama promoted his health
care bill in conservative terms. While still a candidate, he
resisted proposals for a mandate to buy insurance. He saw that as
the kind of big-government idea that doomed Hillary-care,' Mr.
Hayward said, referring to the reform championed by Hillary
Rodham Clinton when she was the first lady.
Historians liken Mr. Obama's challenge to Roosevelt's, who had
parts of his New Deal struck down in his first term. The lesson
for this president, said David M. Kennedy, a historian at
Stanford, is to forge a coalition robust enough to change the
political landscape. Roosevelt was elected to a second term in a
landslide in 1936, cementing the New Deal.
Even if Mr. Obama is re-elected, he could face further legal
challenges to the health care law from the states. Likewise,
changes in the nation's political landscape could render this
week's ruling less definitive than it now appears. But the
Supreme Court has given the president crucial standing to make
his case.
It's not so much that the court has, in one stroke, affirmed his
legislative legacy,' said Laurence H. Tribe, a Harvard
constitutional law professor who taught both Mr. Obama and Chief
Justice John Roberts. That will depend on what happens down the
road. But there is an interdependence here: the court's decision
to say, 'this is not an un-American act' is critical.
alicedh@verizon.net
_______________________________________________
Blind-Democracy mailing list
Blind-Democracy@octothorp.org
http://www.octothorp.org/mailman/listinfo/blind-democracy
_______________________________________________
Blind-Democracy mailing list
Blind-Democracy@octothorp.org
http://www.octothorp.org/mailman/listinfo/blind-democracy
No comments:
Post a Comment