The chairman of the House Financial Services Committee has cultivated a pugnacious persona, but on financial reform he may be fighting for the wrong side.
For more on pruning back executive power see Pruning Shears.
On Friday, we learned that the U.S. unemployment rate officially broke 10% for the first time since the early Reagan years. This is about as bad as it gets for a modern, developed economy. No economic force takes a heavier toll on a society than rampant joblessness, and few personal setbacks take a deeper psychological toll than being out of a job for months on end. If Congress and President Obama don't do something to create jobs fast, both are going to pay a hefty political price when next year's mid-term elections roll around.
So how bad is it? In October, the economy shed 190,000 jobs and the unemployment rate jumped from 9.8% to 10.2%. That percentage is the most optimistic reading of the labor market in Friday's report. If you take people who want full-time jobs but are settling for part-time work, then add those who have simply given up on finding a job, the rate is a massive 17.5%.
The problem is not that either Obama or Congress have failed to act on the problem, but rather that they have not done enough. When Congress was moving on Obama's $787 billion economic stimulus package back in February, we were shedding upwards of 700,000 jobs a month. So the stimulus package has worked-it's probably helped keep unemployment from jumping to 12% or 13%. But this is cold comfort to the nation's 15.7 million unemployed, 5.6 million of whom have been out of a job for more than six months.
As Robert Reich notes for Salon, Obama's economic advisers dramatically underestimated how bad things would get when they crafted the stimulus package. As a result, the package was too small and unemployment has remained high. Obama needs to go back to Congress and demand more economic relief funding. Republicans will continue to whine about government spending to excuse their obstructionism, of course, and conservative Democrats will probably start sweating, too-Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE) helped cut back the original stimulus bill in February to help boost his "centrist" credentials. This of course had nothing to do with economics or policy. Government spending is what saves the economy in a recession. In a downturn as severe as this one, it takes a lot of spending to turn things around.
But as Reich notes, Nelson and his cohorts will have a lot more to worry about in the 2010 elections if the economy doesn't actually improve over the next year. And few economists think it will. The Congressional Budget Office, which is run by a conservative economist named Douglas Elmendorf, projects an average unemployment rate of over 10% in 2010. That's worse than this year. Democrats from swing districts need to support economic relief packages. Continued economic malaise will severely hurt them at the polls.
Congress finally took some action on joblessness on Thursday, voting to extend unemployment benefits for an additional 14 weeks. If we want the economy to recover, we need people to spend money, but if people aren't working, they don't have any money to spend. So the government cuts people checks to help them get by and stimulate a demand for goods and services. Even most conservative economists thinks this is a good idea.
But as Kevin Drum notes for Mother Jones, the soundness of the policy did nothing to prevent Republicans from fighting the effort to extend benefits tooth-and-nail. The bill had to overcome three-that's right, three-filibusters in the Senate from Republicans, who held up the bill for weeks for no apparent reason. In a blog post for The Washington Monthly, Steve Benen explains the economic cost of this obstructionism: In the weeks of delay, 200,000 people looking for work stopped receiving benefits.
But extending unemployment benefits will not solve our economic woes. The total program is just $2.4 billion, a drop in the bucket compared to the trillions of dollars the government put up to salvage Wall Street. $2.4 billion is not enough to reverse the unemployment trend. Cutting the checks certainly helps, but as Matthew Rothschild emphasizes for The Progressive, we need an economic policy that actually puts people back to work. We've known for months that the stimulus was too small and watched the labor market continue to deteriorate. We need more than tweaks at the economic margins, we need a robust job creation plan.
As Stephen Franklin notes for Working In These Times, we already know that the recession has created a significant jump in the nation's poverty rate. According to official government statistics, the rate climbed from 12.5% to 13.2% in 2008, the largest increase since 1991. But the National Academy of Science thinks the government statistics are misleading, as they account for rising costs associated with medical care, transportation, child care and different regional living standards, as Franklin notes. Taking these factors into account, the National Academy of Sciences calculates the actual poverty rate to be 15.8%. That's an additional 7 million people living in poverty, for a total of over 47 million. That's more than the entire population of the New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Philadelphia metropolitan areas combined. What's worse, we don't have poverty statistics for this year, when the most severe economic damage was been dealt.
Workers are facing tough economic prospects around the world. Writing for The Nation, Kristina Rizga details Latvia's economic turmoil. Just like the US, overexcited bankers in Latvia inflated a massive real estate bubble that took down the entire economy when it burst. But with the bubble burst, much of the country is now out of a job and stuck with a mortgage worth far less than what they paid for it. It's almost exactly the same story we've seen at home.
No domestic economic problem is more pressing than our epic levels of unemployment. We need another round of stimulus to get people working again. If not, we'll see the same public unrest here as in Eastern Europe.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the economy by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Audit for a complete list of articles on economic issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Mulch, The Pulse and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
While the New York State Senate has put off marriage for the moment (it may still be voted upon later this week or next, and calls are still important), two big wins today in DC.
Today, the Committee on Public Safety & Judiciary (part of the DC Council) passed legislation legalizing same-sex marriage equality, 4-1. The committee legislation also retained the ability to register for new domestic partnerships, which was the one big part of the bill I didn't like. There are some gay couples who don't believe in the term marriage but need to have the rights that come with it. There are also heterosexual individuals who benefit- I know two sisters living together who are both single and heterosexual, but want each other to have, for example, medical decision rights. The original draft of the bill phased this out but Councilmember Catania and Chairman Mendelson wisely put them back in.
The bill will be put on the agenda for the Committee of the Whole on Nov. 17th and a full Council vote will take place on Dec. 1st, with a second vote to take place on either Dec. 15th or Jan. 5th. The bill is then sent to the Mayor, who has two weeks to act. He is fully expected to sign, and in the case of the law recognizing marriages from outside DC, he signed it on the same day.
Then the 30-day legislative review process begins. This is complicated, but a legislative day is any day that a house of Congress is in session. If it's a three-day weekend because of a holiday, all three days count. If it's more than three days, the Monday and Tuesday doesn't count. It gets even more fun, but the point is that the 30-day process next year should take about 2.5 months.
The real obstacle is in the budget process. With the 30-day thing, it takes a joint resolution of Congress, and a signature by the President, to prevent an act of Congress from becoming law- extremely unlikely. The 30-day thing is more of a delay than an obstacle. With the budget process, because Congress controls our purse strings, Congress can restrict enactment of the law through the DC Appropriations bill. They've done so in the past with DC's needle exchange law, preventing funds from being used to actually implement the law. That will be up for debate next summer and fall and where we are likely to have a fight on our hands. But unless a different effect date is added to the bill, it will become a law when the review period ends early next year.
There has been a great wailing and gnashing of teeth over the past day or so as those who follow the healthcare debate react to the Stupak/Some Creepy Republican Guy Amendment.
The Amendment, which is apparently intended to respond to conservative Democrats' concerns that too many women were voting for the Party in recent elections, was attached to the House's version of healthcare reform legislation that was voted out of the House this weekend.
The goal is to limit women's access to reproductive medicine services, particularly abortions; this based on the concept that citizens of good conscience shouldn't have their tax dollars used to fund activities they find morally repugnant.
At first blush, I was on the mild end of the wailing and gnashing spectrum myself...but having taken a day to mull the thing over, I'm starting to think that maybe we should take a look at the thinking behind this...and I'm also starting to think that, properly applied, Stupak's logic deserves a more important place in our own vision of how a progressive government might work.
It's Political Judo Day today, Gentle Reader, and by the time we're done here it's entirely possible that you'll see Stupak's logic in a whole new light.
Troop levels and insurgency strategies have dominated the discussion about Afghanistan, but there may be an important ulterior motive for those in favor of a ramped up military effort.
For more on pruning back executive power see Pruning Shears.
Various attempts to reform the financial system are bouncing around the capitol these days. The reaction of one of Wall Street's biggest players to them may be as good an indicator as any of how serious they are.
For more on pruning back executive power see Pruning Shears.
I will feel bad for people living in states that opt out of a public insurance option. However it won't help them one bit if people in NO states are given the choice of a public option instead. Understand that I write this as someone who strongly supports establishing a Single Payer, or Medicare for All, public health insurance system in America; NOW. Sure I support that, but I also know that there isn't a prayer of a chance of making that happen, not now.
Call the system unfair, call the game rigged, unless someone has the power to change that system or nullify that game it will be go on being played under the rules in effect. I am not a defeatist, I am a fighter, and mine has been one small voice among many pushing the fight forward in the current session of Congress. I have witnessed our ability to move a mountain, against all seeming insider odds, to keep some form of a public option alive, to expose and reject the false promise of a "trigger to nowhere" being offered us as a sleeping pill instead. Our power is real. And so is the mountain. Our ability to move it slightly helped crack the aura of it's permanent invincibility. But that mountain is still there, pushed a few yards further down the road.
The great Wall Street Bail Out, TARP and the various programs associated with it, continues to breed deep levels of resentment and cynicism in the American public who footed the bill for rescuing the financial sector in America. The resentment is easy to understand. The fact that there really were no good options left by the time Obama was elected President helps to explain his Administration's actions in that crisis, all taken under duress and incredible pressure with virtually no time for full contemplation let alone careful detailed planning. Those facts do almost nothing though to deal with the publics anger, which repeatedly flares up like a California wild fire facing El Nino winds. Huge Goldman Sachs bonuses and Wells Fargo record profits are merely the latest gale wind gusts. All the while cynicism keeps growing that our government is in bed with giant financial interests writing sweetheart legislation as Valentine Day presents for corporate Sugar Daddies in a ritual that repeats as often and predictably as Groundhog Day in Hollywood.
It was a long hot August for those who would like to see health care reform, as rabid "Town Hall" protesters proffered visions of public options that would lead to death panels and socialism and government tax collectors with special alien mind control powers that would use sex education and child indoctrination and black helicopters as the means for gay people to impose their dangerous agenda on the innocent, God-fearing citizens of someplace in Mississippi that I'm not likely to ever visit.
Part of the reason that opposition was so rabid was because health care interests were spending millions upon millions of dollars doing...well, doing whatever the opposite of giving a distemper shot to the angry mob might be, anyway.
So wouldn't it be great if all the CEOs of all those health care interests were to gather at one time and place so you could, shall we say, gently express your own thoughts regarding the issues of reform and public options?
By an amazing coincidence, that's exactly what's going to happen Thursday in Washington, DC, as the Patient Centered Primary Care Cooperative (PCPCC) holds its Annual Summit.
Follow along, and I'll tell you everything you need to know.
There has been a lot of talk the past few weeks about the false possibility of health care rationing in the current storm of discussions surrounding President Obama's health care reform plan, as well as options put forth by Congressional Democrats such as Senator Max Baucus.
While rationing may be a popular topic - particularly among the conservative and right leaning blogosphere, it is, at its core, a health care myth. Unlike the health care debate in 1994, where Harry and Louise were lamenting government rationing on behalf of the insurance companies, rationing has no place in current health care reform bills.
According to the American Medical Association, "The health reform plans being debated in Congress ensure that health care decisions will be made by you and your doctor - no one else."
So we are now finding out the answers to some of our questions about which members of Congress actually represent We, the People...and which ones represent, Them, the Corporate Masters.
We have seen a Democratic Senator propose a policy that would put people in jail for not buying health insurance and a Democratic President who has taken numerous public beatings from those on the left side of the fence for his inability to ram something through a group of people...and yes, folks, the entendre was intentional.
But most of all, we've been asking ourselves: "why would Democratic Members of Congress who will eventually want us to vote for them vote against something that nearly all voting Democrats are inclined to vote for?"
Today's conversation attempts to answer that question by looking at exactly how money and influence flow through a key politician, Montana's Senator Max Baucus-and in doing so, we examine some ugly political realities that have to be resolved before we can hope to convince certain Members of Congress to vote for what their constituents actually want when it really counts.
This week the House Majority Leader came out strongly against revoking the telecom amnesty passed in last year's FISA Amendment Act. Taken together with his other major policy positions, has anyone done more active harm to the left's priorities?
For more on pruning back executive power see Pruning Shears.
If you haven't had a chance to read Chris' great post this afternoon on teachable moments for other Dems from this episode with Rep. Alan Grayson, go ahead and take a look. One of the most salient points that stands out to me is that too many Dems in Congress don't know that there are all of us out here on the 'tubes ready to back someone who stands up like Alan Grayson did. As a result, there are many who don't speak their mind and challenge the Republicans' rhetoric and policy... or if they do, they quickly walk it back with an apology.
Tonight with Ed Schultz (who is VERY fired up and applauding), Grayson stated that point in another way. Take a look:
"We need Democrats with guts." It's not just hot air- Grayson is a living, breathing example of what happens when you have guts. He has an extra $100,000+ over the last 24 hours with which to continue doing battle in Congress, and that means something to other members. Blue America's "Carrots AND Sticks" action, which raised over $400,000 in just days for House members who stood firm on the public option, is another example. It's one of the best ways those of us out here can communicate that we support those who support us.
I'm mentioned it offhandedly in a few places here, but we here in DC are quietly moving forward with our own bill on marriage equality. For a little background, DC is a city of about 590,000 people, governed by a 13-member city council, five of whom are from at-large seats, and a popularly elected mayor. Legislation passed by the Council and signed by the Mayor must go for a Congressional review period where it can be overturned. Congress can also screw with our laws by denying funding since our appropriations bill must go through Congress (this has been used in the past by Republicans to, for example, deny DC funding to implement our legislatively-passed needle exchange program).
But, most of the news I have is very good. I heard some final details last night from two colleagues taking point on this, legislatively speaking.
The Religious Freedom and Civil Marriage Equality Amendment Act of 2009 will be introduced on October 6th. 10 of the 13 DC Council members are co-sponsors, and while I'm extremely doubtful we'll get to a unanimous vote, we should get very close. A hearing will be held in late October, with a vote to follow.
Mayor Fenty has repeatedly stated he will sign the bill.
The bill will then go to Congress for a 30-day Congressional review period. The 30 days can stop and start depending on when Congress is in session, and timing of when legislative days start etc. so we expect this to last about two months, more or less. We're working with the Democratic leadership to do our best and make sure there are not opportunities for votes to overturn it, but anything is far from certain.
We currently have a comprehensive domestic partnership law for same-sex and opposite-sex couples in the city. One provision in the bill would end the right of same-sex and opposite-sex couples to register for new domestic partnerships, which I oppose, as there are some- sisters who live together, for example- who would choose to register under such an arrangement for multiple purposes, even with marriage. I also know gay couples who simply do not agree with the concept of "marriage", but deserve legal protections. I would like to see this provision stricken.
Regarding a ballot initiative, Bishop Harry Jackson, the local major domo homophobe (who actually lives in Beltsville, MD), has filed a request with the Board of Elections and Ethics to collect signatures for an initiative to ban marriage equality. The good news is that his last request (a few months ago) was denied on the grounds that it violates the District's Human Rights Act, which bans discrimination of the sort. Multiple sources have told me it is almost certain the BOEE will do the same this time.
Having marriage equality in DC would not only be an incredible accomplishment for DC's LGBT couples (DC has one of the highest percentages of LGBT individuals of any metropolitan area in the country), but would be hugely symbolic to have it in our nation's capital.
DC for Marriage, one of the groups I've been working with taking the lead on the ground all summer long, will continue to do so throughout the fall. Even if you don't live in DC, you can sign up for their e-mail list and join their Facebook group (the Facebook organizing is particularly great). Even better, ask your friends who live here or in suburban VA or MD to do so.
The problem with this outrage is that most of the spending overall, and most of the increase is spending, is for congressional staff. If Congress were to cut those salaries or to cut those staff, here is what would happen:
An even higher percentage of Congressional staff would become Ivy League trust-fund babies who don't need the money. Given that Congressional staff salaries are already pretty low compared to other professional jobs in major urban areas, a very high percentage of Congressional staff are already Ivy League trust-fund babies.
Hard for me to see how the "make more Congressional staffers upper-class Ivy Leaguers" platform is a particularly populist way to improve Congressional responsiveness to the economic concerns of anyone but the top 1-10% of income earners.
There are 35,000+ registered lobbyists in D.C. Most of those lobbyists are highly paid (5X to 10X the amount of Congressional staff) corporate shills. These lobbyists perform much of the actual congressional staffing on Capitol Hill, from fundraising, to writing legislation, to informing members of Congress about policy, to connecting members of Congress with each other and on and on. They perform these functions because they are effectively free staff for otherwise overworked and understaffed Congressional offices. They fill a staff vacuum for Congress.
If we were to cut the Congressional budget and reduce the amount of staff available to members of Congress, then these well-heeled corporate shills would perform an even greater percentage of Congressional staff functions. Again, hard for me to see how handing over an even larger percentage of the day to day operations of Congress is a particularly effective way to get Congress to become more responsive to the needs and desires of the American people.
So yeah, let's us on the left bash Congress for increasing its operating budget, most of which goes to staff. I'm sure it will be good for a little populist anger, but the actual policy we are advocating for is a further corporate takeover of government. Which is exactly what all of the right-wing, anti-government populist outrage in this same vein is designed to do.
Look, I love BarbinMD, and I am pretty pissed at Congress right now too, but if you want a government that is not run by the wealthiest people and institutions of our society, then you have to pay for it. People from middle-class backgrounds with huge college debts cannot live in Washington, D.C. on $30,000 a year. Individual members of Congress simply cannot perform all of the duties required of an effective Representative of the people without staff support. And lefties who whip up populist anger about the size of the Congressional operating budget are doing their own ideological and policy causes a real blow by advocating that we cut the Congressional budget.
And for the record, I grew up in an upper middle class household, am a part-owner of an LLC, and attended to St. Catherine's College at Oxford University. So it's not like I am bashing corporations and well-to-do Ivy Leaguers just out of spite. But hey, if you think that only people even more privileged than me should be running the country, by all means, keep advocating for cuts to the Congressional operating budget.
The attorney general announced a new policy for the executive branch's treatment of the state secrets privilege. But it is not so much a bold step towards greater openness as lipstick on a pig.
For more on pruning back executive power see Pruning Shears.
I wrote a post a few days ago outlining some thoughts on a discussion around state strategy vs. federal strategy to winning LGBT equality. A few follow-up thoughts came from that, and I want to take a minute to outline them here.
In the post, I discussed how winning victories at the state level is necessary to winning at the federal level, and how multiple victories have been obtained at the state level. I want to give a little time to the argument that those who live in very anti-LGBT states with little or no investment in infrastructure can only find equality through the federal path, and are actually hurt by some state-focused efforts.
My friend and colleague Bil Browning, who lives in Indiana, argued here that (a) winning marriage in places like Massachusetts has actually hurt in Indiana, losing an opportunity for hate crimes and employment protections, and forcing all resources towards fighting off an amendment (b) Indiana will never get rights/protections anytime soon except through the federal path.
I don't quarrel with much of that. On the other hand, passing marriage equality in Maine, while it may renew the haters' fight in Indiana for a constitutional amendment, also energizes advocates elsewhere and sends important signals across the country. Call it conventional wisdom, but I believe a big reason New Hampshire and Maine (very narrowly) legalized marriage equality through legislation is because the Iowa Supreme Court did so unanimously on April 3. The first vote in the NH Senate on April 29 was just 13-11. A publicly hand-wringing Gov. Lynch finally signed the bill after sending it back to the legislature. On April 30th, the vote in the Maine Senate was 20-15. Gov. Baldacci went through his own period of refusing to state his position until finally signing the bill. I can't prove it, but I suspect there are legislators who, like many of my straight friends and colleagues said to me, said "well, if a place like Iowa can...". I think what happened in Iowa barely nudged the other states across the finish line.
Movement in various states, can and will eventually bring equality to other states. To their credit, Bil and the team at The Bilerico Project are even on their way to raising $5,000 for the Maine fight, even though a win may set back efforts in Indiana. One good reason for doing so is, like I argued in my previous post, that it's essential for many states to enact pro-equality measures before we have the votes at the federal level. The best measure for whether a member of Congress will vote for something like employment protections is to look at their own state. That means investing in Maine, even if it will hurt you in Indiana, is a necessary evil, especially since your path to equality is via Congress.
Marriage equality, like other issues in our movement, is a mixed bag that can vastly advance equality for many and cause a backlash for others, like Bil says it did in Indiana. The same is true of many issues the first time they hit the papers. The Dade County, FL ordinance that banned discrimination against gays and lesbians led to Anita Bryant's "Save Our Children" campaign, the success of which prompted the Briggs Initiative in California. Backlashes will happen regardless. It doesn't mean Dade County legislators never should have done the right thing. On the whole, our movement needs to advance equality in as many places as possible, not be worried about the backlash from fighting battles that need to be won. Investing in state-based approaches yields real fruit that can bring equality to other states- as Iowa did- as well as lay the groundwork for Congress to take action.
Last night, President Obama laid out his vision for health care reform before a special joint session of Congress. The pillars of his plan are: i) Curbing the worst abuses of private insurance, ii) Requiring everyone to have insurance, iii) Insurance exchanges, which are basically government websites where customers can order insurance off a "menu" of plans, the idea being that if tens of millions of people order the #2 Combo, everyone's lunch will be cheaper.
The president made it clear that the country can't afford to wait for reform. Last night, he took on the self-proclaimed fiscal conservatives who claim that they oppose reform because it would increase the deficit. "Put simply, our health care problem is our deficit problem. Nothing else even comes close," Obama said. The president reminded the audience that each of us pays a "hidden tax" of $1000 dollars a year to subsidize charity and emergency care for the uninsured.
It was an impressive performance, but as John Nichols of the Nation observes, it was hardly a rousing, "to-the-barricades" oration:
Obama still talked about "options" and "choices." But he suggested that they would be offered mainly by insurance companies that would be enjoy "incentives"-i.e., new streams of taxpayer dollars-if they agree to abide by consumer-friendly regulations and come up with strategies for covering more of the uninsured.
The president expressed support for a very limited public option, a kind of welfare program that only about 5% of Americans would choose to join. This is not the public option his liberal supporters had in mind. It's non-threatening to the insurance companies, though. Private insurers love the idea of the government low-grading the insurance pool and taking on the sickest people who can't get coverage anywhere else. That means private insurers can make even more money off the remaining healthy, paying customers.
James Ridgeway of Mother Jones is even less optimistic, "As for the public option, that's pretty clearly gone down the drain."
One GOP legislator decided that a joint session of Congress was basically a town hall with the president. Rep. Joe Wilson (SC) screamed "You lie!" when the president explained, for the umpteenth time that undocumented immigrants will not be covered. As with the town halls, Wilson's performance had a whiff astroturf about it. Sure enough, Sue Sturgis of Raw Story found that Wilson pocketed over $2 million in campaign contributions from the health care industry.
The president also reminded America that health care reform will not pay for abortions. (For more on myth-making around women's health, see Laurie Rubiner's excellent post at RH Reality.)
Instead of presenting a vision and asking Congress to line up behind him, the president stressed that he was synthesizing a compromise position incorporating ideas from the left and the right. Instead of a coherent vision, the president's scheme sounds more like a last-ditch compromise plan to enable him to declare victory. Like many Democrats, the president seems to be confusing the strategic with the expedient. If "reform" means saddling ordinary Americans with expensive mandatory insurance without a meaningful public option to keep costs in check he could doom the electoral fortunes of the Democrats for years to come.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about health care and is free to reprint. Visit Healthcare.newsladder.net for a complete list of articles on health care affordability, health care laws, and health care controversy. For the best progressive reporting on the Economy, and Immigration, check out Economy.Newsladder.net and Immigration.Newsladder.net. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and created by NewsLadder.
When the White House announced last week that the President would be addressing a joint session of Congress on the health care issue, I suggested that the President was raising the stakes not just through the roof but to the stars beyond. Well, he hit the jackpot tonight. I have been listening closely to Presidential speeches for about 35 years now, have watched quite a few oldies but goodies from the past, have even contributed ideas to a fair share of speeches in the Clinton years, and I am sitting here thinking that was one of the very best Presidential speeches I have ever heard. JFK's inaugural and a couple of FDR's best are the only ones I can think of that moved me so much. More importantly, though, he did everything he needed to do:
Lay out clearly what he strongly believes in
Make a powerful argument for why we need to get this done
Answer the phony scare tactics
Fire up the people around the country who want to get this done to keep working to make it happen
On the public option, as I expected him to do given his long-term strategy, he kept his options open. No one should feel surprised that he did that given that he has been clear from the beginning that he is going to be open to negotiations with Senators like Snowe and Ben Nelson on the issue. But I was pleased that he made clear not only that he was for a public option, but gave a full-throated multi-paragraph defense of it. He did what public option advocates needed him to do, which was to make clear that he supported it.
I was also very happy that the President took the Republicans on quite forcefully. While continuing to offer his hand, he made clear he wasn't going to take their BS any longer without pushing back.
As one who has been unhappy about a fair amount of Obama's communications strategy on health care up until now, I came away from tonight's speech a very happy man. He took a very big gamble, but I think he will get a great a pay-off from it. He stood and delivered. Now I just hope Congress will find it within itself to do the same.
He finally called a lie a lie. Good on him. It may not stop the Republicans from lying some more, but maybe there's a chance that crap like "DEATH PANELS!!!!!" and "GOVERNMENT TAKEOVER!!!!!!" stop gaining traction.
Policy: C+
Yes, he finally said "public option"... But then caved some by remaining "open" to co-op craps and never-to-be-enforced "triggers". And worse, he called on Congressional Democrats to be ready to cave in as well. I hope they ignore those sentences from him. And hopefully, Obama himself isn't all that serious in selling out his progressive base AND the chance for real health care reform for a few feel-good "we'll say there's no more preexisting condition discrimination, but let the HMOs continue to do whatever they want" thirty pieces of silver.
