Here's a letter to the editor I submitted to Savannah Morning News back in December.
An ode to “progressives.”
Last night I welcomed Keith Olbermann and the progressive blogosphere into my home for the first time in nearly two years. After perusing the netroots affected with a stirring mix of heartbreak and vindication, I tuned into Mr. Olbermann's program until the very end, where he concluded with a signature “Special Comment.”
In the intervening period, these people—my erstwhile comrades—had become unbearable for one small tic of theirs: what I perceived to be their fanatical fealty to and unrelenting defenses of Barack Obama.
It's an attitude that elicits potent feelings of shock and betrayal coming, as it happens to, from a young black man, in a majority-black town. From the very beginning, the current writer never bought the conceit of Mr. Obama's symbolic rise as inherently conducive to radical, real, or even modest progress for black people. And so I backed Hillary Rodham Clinton. Though she and the former president were, quite notably, the original triangulators, I felt that through her long, often infamous and incredibly fascinating travails in the harsh milieu of primetime American politics, she had developed a stronger sense of herself and would amount to an imminently less predictable puppet than Mr. Obama has been. (And to be sure, in the final stages of the campaign—back against the wall—she intimated truly progressive instincts.)
Last night many of my old friends on the progressive left staggered back home—exhausted, dejected, feeling a bit foolish—from intellectual wasteland. With a little help from the menacing Joe Lieberman, they’d finally realized what I’d maintained all along: that the health care “reform”—if any at all—to be signed by Mr. Obama would be an absolute monstrosity. Because of the nation’s dire fiscal straits, as well as the understandable future concerns of cost-cutting and the resultant rationing by the government, I had always been reluctant about my optimal choice of Medicare-for-All, as well as the so-called public option, whatever that is. But the bill we have now—the bill that we were going to get all along—is a disgrace. The main problem is the individual mandate. (Allow us, for a second, to excuse the arguable unconstitutionality of the individual mandate, which Mrs. Clinton misguidedly insisted upon in the campaign.) The inclusion of a government plan to compete with private insurance at least gave citizens a choice. Any proposed legislation with the odious mandate that doesn’t include government competition is to be regarded as a bailout of the insurance industry. Obama and his benefactors are throwing the American people into a deregulated market (the cost-control features of the bill are chimera) to be flayed alive by the private insurers.
It would be akin to—if I'm permitted to borrow an example seen someplace I can’t recall—the government mandating that as a condition of lawful residence in the United States, we all buy cars and auto insurance without the availability of public transportation.
This illustrates why Mr. Obama is so dangerous. Republicans would never dare propose such policy. They are often inconsistent, but in the main, their partiality to business interests is predicated on an ideological aversion to government constraints in the service of the mystical “free market.” The sort of government-mandated cartel the Obama-Lieberman health care bill amounts to hasn’t even that justification. It’s an awful brand of corporatism.
My friends on the left that are beginning to come around are still wrong on the exact details of how we arrived here. Mr. Olbermann, last evening, passionately pleaded for the president to show leadership. Others mimic the critique, chalking up the problem to Mr. Obama’s weakness. Not so. Mr. Obama is not a victim of the congressionally-domineered process nor is he a mere opportunist waiting to sign whatever emerges from the Congress to please his insatiable ego. The truth is far more alarming. His White House gave barely a word to single-payer from the beginning, weighed in against the public option last summer and directed the acquiescence to Mr. Lieberman here recently. Our elitist corporatist president is getting exactly what he wanted from the very outset.
Welcome home, gang.
Pretty cool, I thought. Apparently they did not. It wasn't published. :(
I think all of this held up pretty well, if I'm permitted to say so. The one glaring exception is my supposing that Republicans would never posit something like an individual mandate--indefensible, constitutionally-questionable, and liberty-trampling as it is. How can I explain such a ridiculous supposition? Nevermind a charitable explanation; let's chalk it up to ignorance and my momentary failure to remember how thoroughly corrupt, and corporatist, both parties mostly are. Leave aside past Republican constitutional perfidy on issues like the war on terror police state ("Terrorist Surveillance Program," et al). This line of reasoning was wrong even in the relevant area of health care reform. The individual mandate is, of course, a reactionary Republican invention. And to be sure, the mandate was the linchpin of MassCare--ObamaCare implemented on the state level in Massachusetts, for all intents and purposes--which was signed by a still adamant Mitt Romney. (Furthermore, the fact that Romney is still considered a '12 frontrunner reveals a breathtaking level of hypocrisy, excuse-making, and doomed cynical calculating on the part of many a Republican--not Tea Party--voter.)
But maybe that's not the only thing that didn't hold up. I think I may have been too hopeful about the intellectual awakening of "progressives" like Keith Olbermann (Dylan Ratigan, Rachel Maddow, and other people who voiced grave misgivings about the Obama-Baucus-Lieberman "reform"). In fact, these people are utterly hopeless. What they all said in December was swept aside in a matter of weeks, and reached a fever pitch as we inched closer to the bill's possible passage. By the end of the ordeal they were angrily remonstrating against people like gullible doofus Bart Stupak of Michigan for having the gumption to possibly derail the same measure they criticized (and threatened to protest, in the case of Olbermann) a short while before. Lame. Wankers. All of them.
