Health care reform goes Pthbbbbt

[Bells]

Originally Posted by Gregness

The thing I don't get is how this gets put totally on Obama's plate. He may be the most powerful man in the world, but he's only one man. No matter how powerful the presidency may have gotten he doesn't actually have much legislative power beyond giving speeches (and the veto)and as far as I can tell he's been doing plenty of that.

I actually have this in mind too... but i don't live in the USA so i guess there is that to consider also.

The previous President didn't seem to have any trouble affecting the course of that particular country through the exercise of his personal power.

Well, it does seem easier to do so when the majority of people in power agree with you, don't have their tails pinned on the other side, and/or aren't to actively destroy/stall all of your work.

The problem as I've seen it is that he's basically the deciding factor in most of these instances and he's the one who, if he doesn't guide it directly, he at least has to give it the go-ahead.

Is he really?
I mean, i see that he can tell "what we want to do" and "When i want it done" ... but then it goes trough all these "houses" and "Halls" and places were hundreds of people (where a good half is made of people who don't like him, or don't have the balls to support him) try to change, jack, strip, pin and turn these things around in the light that shines best on their eyes...

Also, it's not entirely out of line that when he came to office the last guy in there left a pretty fucking huge mess for him to clean. The entire Bailout mess, the Wall Street shitstorm and All those wars those are things that he couldn't ignore nor "turn it off" in the passe of a day nor a month.

I Agree that Obama is showing more power of speech than power to make his employees do what he tells them to do, but it's kinda hard to make shit happen right when half your peeps are playing against the house team.

[Krylo]

President has exactly one power--the power of Veto.

This means that he has zero actual legislative power, HOWEVER he totally IS the one who has to give things the go ahead. Any law he doesn't like, he can veto.

The president, traditionally, uses this power to 'suggest' laws to congress as well as make deals with them. Basically it's not in congress's best interests to totally cheese off the president because then he will simply veto everything, but it's not in the presidents best interest to just veto everything for no reason, because then he can't get congress to put forth the laws he wants.

It's part of the 'checks and balances' system that worked real well before you figured corruption into it.

[Fifthfiend]

The president has all kinds of power besides the veto oh hell here I'll let Glenn Greenwald explain it:

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwa...ama/index.html

As the leader of his party, the President commands a vast infrastructure on which incumbent members of Congress rely for re-election. His popularity among Democrats vests him numerous options to punish non-compliant Democrats. And Rahm Emanuel built his career on controlling the machinations within Congress. The very idea that Obama, Emanuel and company are just sitting back, helplessly watching as Max Baucus, Kent Conrad and the Blue Dogs (Rahm's creation) destroy their health care legislation, is absurd on its face.

When it comes to defiant progressive members of Congress -- as opposed to supposedly defiant Blue Dogs and "centrists" -- the Obama White House has proven itself extremely adept at compelling compliance with the President's agenda. Consider what happened when progressive House members dared to oppose the war supplemental bill which Obama wanted passed:

The White House is playing hardball with Democrats who intend to vote against the supplemental war spending bill, threatening freshmen who oppose it that they won't get help with reelection and will be cut off from the White House, Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-Calif.) said Friday.

"We're not going to help you. You'll never hear from us again," Woolsey said the White House is telling freshmen

When progressives refuse to toe the White House line, they get threatened. Contrast that with what the White House does with Blue Dogs and "centrists" who are allegedly uncooperative on health care -- they protect them:

The Politico’s Jonathan Martin reported this morning that Rahm Emanuel warned leaders of liberal groups in a private meeting this week that it was time to stop running ads attacking Blue Dog and "centrist" Dems on health care.

I'm told, however, that Emanuel went quite a bit further than this.

Sources at the meeting tell me that Emanuel really teed off on the Dem-versus-Dem attacks, calling them "f–king stupid." This was a direct attack on some of the attendees in the room, who are running ads against Dems right now.

What does that vast disparity reveal? If anything, Blue Dogs -- virtually all of whom represent more conservative districts -- are more vulnerable and thus more dependent for re-election on the White House and Democratic Party infrastructure than progressives are. If health care fails and the Obama presidency weakens, they will bear the brunt of the voters' desire to punish Democrats. The White House would have at least as much leverage to exercise against Blue Dogs and centrists. They just aren't doing so. In fact, they're doing the opposite: they're protecting them even as they supposedly impede what the White House wants on one of Obama's signature issues.

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/gl...use/index.html

Of all the posts I wrote this year, the one that produced the most vociferous email backlash -- easily -- was this one from August, which examined substantial evidence showing that, contrary to Obama's occasional public statements in support of a public option, the White House clearly intended from the start that the final health care reform bill would contain no such provision and was actively and privately participating in efforts to shape a final bill without it. From the start, assuaging the health insurance and pharmaceutical industries was a central preoccupation of the White House -- hence the deal negotiated in strict secrecy with Pharma to ban bulk price negotiations and drug reimportation, a blatant violation of both Obama's campaign positions on those issues and his promise to conduct all negotiations out in the open (on C-SPAN). Indeed, Democrats led the way yesterday in killing drug re-importation, which they endlessly claimed to support back when they couldn't pass it. The administration wants not only to prevent industry money from funding an anti-health-care-reform campaign, but also wants to ensure that the Democratic Party -- rather than the GOP -- will continue to be the prime recipient of industry largesse.

As was painfully predictable all along, the final bill will not have any form of public option, nor will it include the wildly popular expansion of Medicare coverage. Obama supporters are eager to depict the White House as nothing more than a helpless victim in all of this -- the President so deeply wanted a more progressive bill but was sadly thwarted in his noble efforts by those inhumane, corrupt Congressional "centrists." Right. The evidence was overwhelming from the start that the White House was not only indifferent, but opposed, to the provisions most important to progressives. The administration is getting the bill which they, more or less, wanted from the start -- the one that is a huge boon to the health insurance and pharmaceutical industry. And kudos to Russ Feingold for saying so:

Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.), among the most vocal supporters of the public option, said it would be unfair to blame Lieberman for its apparent demise. Feingold said that responsibility ultimately rests with President Barack Obama and he could have insisted on a higher standard for the legislation.

"This bill appears to be legislation that the president wanted in the first place, so I don’t think focusing it on Lieberman really hits the truth," said Feingold. "I think they could have been higher. I certainly think a stronger bill would have been better in every respect."

Let's repeat that: "This bill appears to be legislation that the president wanted in the first place." Indeed it does. There are rational, practical reasons why that might be so. If you're interested in preserving and expanding political power, then, all other things being equal, it's better to have the pharmaceutical and health insurance industry on your side than opposed to you. Or perhaps they calculated from the start that this was the best bill they could get. The wisdom of that rationale can be debated, but depicting Obama as the impotent progressive victim here of recalcitrant, corrupt centrists is really too much to bear.

In some hypothetical universe where Obama had tried to get a public option and failed then we could talk about how the power of the president is limited. Everything he's actually done has been to downplay, ignore or oppose the public option and he's been phenomenally successful in doing so, so as far as I can tell it looks like the President has plenty of power to push for his (anti-reform) agenda.

[Krylo]

Honestly though, those things are either extensions of the uses of veto I already mentioned--with the using it to control congress--or have little/nothing to do with actual presidential power, and everything to do with just politicking and popularity.

I wasn't saying he was powerless, just trying to educate the foreign members on what powers the president has.

I really didn't feel like typing up a big long political thing, and didn't have someone to copy pasta, so I probably didn't explain how veto grants the president a lot of leverage quite as well as I could of. That is, admittedly, a better explanation, however, and includes the 'democratic/republic president fails and so does the rest of his party' thing, as well.

[Osterbaum]

He's also the commander-in-chief, is he not?

He's gonna go all military on yo ass.

[Tev]

Yeah but the President doesn't fund the military or all the Generals' pet projects, Congress does and members of Congress have been getting it in good with the military for decades.

[Ryanderman]

Originally Posted by Magus

Liberals are too conciliatory to make zany statements like "Republicans want to let insurance companies murder you", "God is pro public option", and "Republicans serve the Dark Lord Be'elzebub"

Have you read this forum?

[Fifthfiend]

He means the liberals who occupy all the positions of actual influence and power.

I mean aside from like Alan "Probably A Cannibal" Grayson, Al "Who The Hell Let Him In Here" Franken, and Anthony "Seriously My Last Name Is" Weiner, god bless their angry little souls.

[Ryanderman]

Ah, well then. That makes sense. It's always seemed to me that the Democrats have a fairly solid base who can agree on most issues, but a fractured leadership who can't agree if water is wet, and would readily concede the possibility that it is, in fact, dry if it would help convince the Republicans to stop making angry faces at them. While the Republicans have a very fractured and argumentative base, with a leadership united by a desire to screw their constituency.

[Bells]

So, if i'm getting this right...

It's kinda like the shock point of 2 great forces. In one side you have the leader of a nation, the most powerfull elected man. in the other, you have hundreds of elected people with less power. They collide and push eachother. They just don't stay on Zero because usually, on the side against the president, part of it is willing to not oppose him, so the difference in forces is less so. So the President can push his way in somewhat, but not all the way.

But in Obama's Case it's seems a tad like the opposite of that. Not only the previous administration left a TON of debris in his way, but the opposition is not giving a inch and the people that are supposed to be on his side don't seem to have the balls to do what they should be able to do.

Still, as wild as it usually gets, the Daily Show comes out as a reliable source of tidbits of information... and i just saw this interview they had with the secretary of transportation... and it's weird. The guy is a Republican, has huge respect for Obama, and if you just take his word everything seems to run like a wonder.