Obama's health-care blitz: a bittersweet war

A "stinging, sustained broadside." That was the Washington Post's provocative characterization of President Obama's assault on health insurance companies earlier this week; and to virtually all of his faithful base and many of the disaffected, it was far more than just an inspirational metaphor.

It encapsulated, instead, a real and fighting response to the outrages of the health industry's Fort Sumters, of its unrestricted submarine warfare, of its sneak attacks. Obama had been patient, he had been reasonable, he had been accommodating and almost insufferably considerate. But no more.

That's one way to look at Obama's speech on Monday, and it's a view whose legitimacy I essentially endorse. Another view, perhaps just as legitimate and nearly as endorsable, is that insurance firms and their allied political hitmen have swarmed unto the breach, dear friends, once more -- which never should have happened, and the White House is now playing a phony and last-minute populist game of vintage ass-covering.

On this second view, while conceding its legitimacy I have nevertheless modified it with "perhaps" and "nearly," since it remains exceedingly difficult if not outright impossible to imagine -- without benefit of hindsight -- what the White House could have done differently.

Historical efforts to fundamentally reform our miserable system of costly and corporate-denying health care have been met by nothing but failure, and this White House embraced those failures as one would a viper.

Whatever previous administrations had tried but failed at -- namely, the Clinton administration's preemptory and even peremptory writing and ownership of a bill -- the Obama administration (wisely, no?) kept at a long arm's length. It allowed the Democratic scamps on Capitol Hill to exercise their legislative prerogatives in their own sandbox, precisely as demanded by those scamps, who threatened, otherwise, some nasty temper tantrums.

The same when it came to the Obama administration's early co-optation of insurance companies and pharmaceuticals. Such maneuvering was, to be sure, universally and understandably despised by the liberal base, yet the Clinton administration's failure to likewise maneuver resulted in that putrid, well-oiled, money-drenched, reform-killing twosome of Harry and Louise.

The Obama White House wasn't about to sit back and watch a replay of that thunderingly televised fiasco, so in this, it actually embraced the vipers. Plus, on the heels of what appeared to be a realigning, liberalizing election, even insurance companies believed they'd be constrained in taking some hits, hence at least some public cooperation and private concessions -- and so believed the White House as well -- weren't out of reasonable bounds.

Finally, in the arena of bipartisanship pursued there's been the charge against Obama of immense naivete; from the one-party stimulus package right on through explosively partisan town halls and the much quieter Blair House powwow, the base has sat and thought and not rarely screamed: What the hell is the president doing? How can he miss the rudely conspicuous fact that the GOP is never, ever going to cooperate? -- on anything.

Yet, as the NY Times' Peter Baker pointed out this week, naivete was hardly the case: "[T]he main point is to look bipartisan to the public ... [The White House] wants to jam a wedge into the fissure inside the Republican Party between, as [Rahm Emanuel] frames it, the descending wing that believes in small government and the ascending wing that believes in no government. Republicans lose, in this theory, whether they cooperate with Obama or not."

This isn't to deny that Obama likely retains his professorial peaceability and relentless devotion to coming and reasoning together, as many exemplary chief executives were able to do in saner times with saner (sane) opposition parties. It is to say there has indeed existed a long-term, subterranean strategy of counteroffensive power, virtually unnoticed or unappreciated by the base, which itself is rather naively addicted to immediate gratification.

But, we are where we are, and regarding my earlier-referenced charge against Obama of "phony populism," I confess I'm ambivalent. Which is to say, I hope it's true, however much its truth wounds.

That in turn is to say that top-down, manufactured populism may yet (although I have my profound doubts) push health-care reform over the finish line; and if that's what it takes, in addition to Capitol Hill bribes and the like, that's pragmatically fine with me. On the other, dispiriting hand, such a tactic betrays and likely assassinates Obama's most cherished ideal upon entering the White House: We are grownups all, and in these uncommonly difficult times we can in fact come and reason together for the greater good of the nation, responsibly and coolly and objectively.

It's of little comfort that we can easily finger Congressional Republicans for having monolithically disallowed this ideal, because as Obama knows, just as you and I both know, it's the nation at large that will suffer the consequences -- through heightened polarization, loudly mobilized and hyperemotional camps, and endlessly confronted deadlock.