The health-care "debate" has dragged on so long and consumed so much political oxygen -- thank you, Congress -- we're becoming brain-damaged players in a vast stage management of vastly superfluous scripts. Worse, we are reaching the point of empty hype and hysteria over rational engagement.
Naturally I exclude the right from the "we" of that diagnosis, since they're beyond brain-damaged. They flatlined long ago, the poor dears, and now feature themselves in nothing but -- even for Roger Corman -- bad Roger Corman flicks. With pupils dilated and arms rigidly extended their call goes forth, "Must ... kill ... progress."
But what of the still-conscious actors? I'm not sure Congressfolks meet that description, either -- they've been on some sort of immovable autopilot for months; factions firmly in place with only their rhetoric spitting occasional droplets of thoughtfulness -- which, in the forefront of this drama, leaves us with the White House and progressives.
They're ensnarled in something of a hazy spat, with their squaring off and clawing at each other signifying very little but supplying "the action." Indeed, only one side is actually squaring off, while to the other it sounds more like a buzzing noise. The White House just needs a bill; the next three years or seven are hinged to that, so Act Two of its perfunctory stage management -- Wednesday's address to an incorrigible Congress -- is bound to disappoint if not enrage portions of the left.
And White House stage management, accompanied by a few hyperadvertised fireworks, is all it is. That, anyway, is my and several million others' educated guess.
Consider this. Yesterday the Washington Post assisted in the hype by reporting that President Obama "will use the speech to add more specifics to his vision for overhauling the nation's health system"; he will "[attempt] a difficult balancing act"; he will "[seek] to win moderate Senate Democrats to his cause without embracing compromises that would alienate liberal House Democrats"; he will be, in short, "much more prescriptive."
Yet what "specifics" have been left unsaid or unclear? The Congressional pillow-smothering of the public option is a virtual fait accompli, while it was weeks ago that the Washington Post catalogued, as Obama was just about to do, all his "specifics." I quote: No Discrimination for Pre-Existing Conditions; No Exorbitant Out-of-Pocket Expenses, Deductibles or Co-Pays; No Cost-Sharing for Preventive Care; No Dropping of Coverage for Seriously Ill; No Gender Discrimination; No Annual or Lifetime Caps on Coverage; Extended Coverage for Young Adults; Guaranteed Insurance Renewal.
Any unequivocal conjuring from the grave of the public option by Obama next Wednesday would be a truly journalistic Get me rewrite! moment. A conjuring accompanied by an insistence, that is. It just won't happen, because any such happening would be, well, otherworldly.
So what, rather perfunctorily as well, I can only guess, do some progressives do? Why of course; they invest what little cash they have and all their emotional effort in fantastically pressuring a decidedly unpressurable White House into grasping for the impossible and wrecking the future.
"If Obama doesn't stand firm on the public option, millions of people will lose hope," screams the Progressive Change Campaign Committee in a mass email, thereby thrusting into the public sphere a blindly misplaced and wholly unnecessary sense of loss, since it was the bill-writing Congress, not Obama, that lethally softened on the pubic option. PCCC's cri de coeur is scandalously misaimed; and the real hell of it is, the organization knows that. It must. No one's political awareness is that developmentally arrested. On the other hand, it's a nice fundraising angle.
Same from MoveOn: "During his campaign, President Obama often said that he believed that change had to come from the bottom up -- not from the top down" -- without once acknowledging that in Washington it's more like the bottom-of-the-barrel-up, meaning Congress.
The above is nothing short of political malpractice. If any progressive organization wishes to encourage thinking among the progressive rank and file -- something I always thought distinguished, at a minimum, the left from the right -- then goddammit it should do some thinking first. At the very least it should target the proper enemy. In some cases that may not be as sexy or profitable or emotionally gratifying, but it would possess the happy upside of being honorable.
Otherwise all one accomplishes is the onset of mass pupil-dilation and roaming rigor mortis. Come on, progressives are better than that, smarter than that. The culpable ones should cut the playacting, get real, and declare enough with the WH-progressive split already. For it is, profoundly, the wrong battle at the wrong time.
Please respond to P.M.'s commentary by leaving comments below and sharing them with the BuzzFlash community. For personal questions or comments you can contact him at fifthcolumnistmail@gmail.com
THE FIFTH COLUMNIST by P.M. Carpenter
No comments:
Post a Comment