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Thursday, March 28 2024 @ 03:38 AM CDT

Howard Dean Is a Genuine Hero

Age of Reason

Taking on Corporate \'Centrists\' (puppets, sellouts) Like Lieberman

By David Sirota, AlterNet. Posted December 19, 2009.

Dean\'s attacks on the Lieberman-gutted health insurance \"reform\" bill are creating the political space for the final version to be better and more progressive.


I want to take a moment just to recognize what has been recognized before, but needs to be recognized right here and now one more time: Howard Dean is a genuine hero.

In coming out against the Lieberman-gutted health insurance \"reform\" bill, Dean is leveraging every shred of power he can muster to create the political space for the final bill -- whether passed now, or later after going back to the drawing board -- to be better and more progressive. He has made a compelling case that the bill \"would do more harm than good,\" as he says in his Washington Post op-ed today -- and in doing that he has made the power struggle between Joe Lieberman\'s Palpatinian forces of insurance/drug industry darkness and the progressive movement far more symmetrical.

Before Dean\'s move, the fight was asymmetrical, as Chris Hayes noted in my interview with him on my radio show yesterday. Before Dean\'s move, Lieberman had the upper hand in that he was the only one who didn\'t seem to care whether he alone killed the bill by joining with Republicans for a filibuster. Now, though, Dean has said to progressive members of Congress that they should be OK killing this bill if that\'s what taking a stand for a better bill means. And you see some of them potentially starting to follow.

This is why the White House and the Beltway media is now publicly freaking out at Dean in a way they never freaked out on corporate Dems (Lieberman, Baucus, Nelson, etc.) who were previously obstructing the bill: Because Dean is threatening to change the dynamic that the Beltway was always counting on -- a dynamic that relied on progressives ultimately capitulating to the Joe Liebermans, the Rahm Emanuels, the insurance industry and the drug lobbyists. That dynamic only exists if progressive members of Congress -- and the larger progressive movement and general public -- believes passing the bill is more important than killing it to make it better. If they and we don\'t believe that, as Howard Dean doesn\'t and as new polls show we don\'t, then suddenly progressive members of Congress and the progressive movement can feel free to be as cutthroat as Lieberman himself.

We can feel free to risk sending a bad bill down to defeat in the cause of making it better -- because we know that the bill in its current, non-improved form is bad. And from that stand, we may get more progressive concessions before this thing is finally done. Just as the old dynamic was based on buying Lieberman\'s vote with insurance/drug industry concessions, this new Dean dynamic could means progressives forcing the leadership and the White House to, say, add back a public option back into this final bill as price for progressive votes.

Of course, there\'s debate about whether or not we think Dean is right on the substance -- about whether the bill is good or bad. I happen to think Dean is right -- I happen to believe that passing this awful bill is not worth it even if this awful bill has a few good things in it. Why?

Because we have the same president and the same Congress for at least another year and they will be forced to go back to the drawing board.

There is certainly a substantive rush to pass reform, what with thousands dying every year for lack of insurance. But there is not the political rush that seems to be the assumption in DC right now. That\'s a manufactured bullshit assumption -- the same one we heard when the very same set of bought-and-paid-for politicians used a financial crisis to rush through a Wall Street bailout with the very same \"must pass it immediately\" rationale. Now they\'re trying to use a health care crisis to rush through an insurance industry bailout.

But here\'s the thing: It\'s not like Barack Obama won\'t be president and Democrats won\'t control Congress tomorrow. They can go back to the drawing board right now and have the same political topography before them when they come back to the House and Senate floors. And last I checked, when this bill was in more progressive form (ie. with a public option and Medicare buy-in) I didn\'t hear any of these voices in DC say the bill needed to be on a \"must pass immediately\" track - only when the bill was gutted are these voices now screaming for it to be immediately passed...hmm...

All of that said, wherever you come down on the substance of the Lieberman-gutted bill, it\'s clear Dean has created a new progressive dynamic here. He has made it more likely that something better will come out of the Congress either now or in the near future than the monstrosity Lieberman has created. How? By doing his part to create the political space and leverage for us to demand more.

Dean\'s move, not surprisingly, is being lambasted by the sycophantic Washington press. As just one example, the Washington Post\'s Chris Cillizza -- one of the most perfectly calibrated barometers of Beltway conventional wisdom -- lashes out at Dean as a \"health care reform spoiler\" (Cillizza, of course, never said this about Lieberman, Landrieu, Nelson, or any of the other conservadems who were threatening to filibuster the bill over the last few months). And tellingly, Cillizza insists Dean\'s principled stand is \"entirely in his own self interest\" - an attempt to completely dismiss the substance of Dean\'s criticism. Of course, if Dean criticizing the administration was \"entirely in his own self interest,\" he would not have been cheering on the bill before it was gutted. And so Cillizza\'s refrain is yet more proof that in Washington\'s \"Church of the Savvy\" movement participants taking principled stands are seen as selfish, petulant, stupid and unserious while politicians who exchange votes for industry campaign contributions (Lieberman, Baucus, etc.) and former politicians who are literally paid to lobby for Big Money (Tom Daschle, as an example) are depicted as thoughtful, selfless, \"moderate\" and \"pragmatic\" team players.

I have to say, Dean\'s multi-year transformation is amazing. I remember when I worked for Bernie Sanders how Vermont had a DLC-ish governor named Howard Dean. To look at him now is to stand in awe, because today\'s Howard Dean is not that Howard Dean. And I believe his transformation is entirely genuine because he had absolutely nothing to gain from it in the way we cynically define \"gain\" in today\'s politics. There are many things to \"gain\" from shutting up and going corporate -- there is little to \"gain\" from championing a progressive cause from a place of authentic conviction. Little to personally \"gain\" -- but much to gain for the country.

Here is a person who has decided not to pull the usual post-retirement dance of worshiping the Establishment and joining The Club. Here is a person whose motives cannot be attacked and who has built an independent base of power the old fashioned way - not through Big Money or through insider connections, but through grassroots organizing, unvarnished policy credibility, and a willingness to stand for principles before party. Here is a person going on television to tell sitting Democratic U.S. senators the cold hard truth to their face: namely that they\'ve sold out. Here is a guy taking on the same obsequious Professional Democratic Elites in DC that are saying we must pass any bill, no matter how destructive, just to give Democrats a political win (the same Professional Democratic Elite that told us to support the Iraq War and the bailout, by the way).

Here is, in short, a rare movement leader in the age of cynicism showing what a movement can do -- or at minimum, have a realistic shot to do -- when it musters a little bit of courage.

http://www.alternet.org/

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Special Comment: Not Health, Not Care, Not Reform
by Keith Olbermann


There could not be a finer line between the words compromise and compromised and tonight, with the greatest possible reluctance, I believe I have to go on the air and state my opinion that the Senate bill in its current form has clearly crossed that line and, as currently constituted, cannot be passed.

We have all watched this bill shrink from limited but encouraging reform, to its current status as - in Dr. Dean\'s frank assessment from last night - \"a bailout for the insurance industry.\" Surely the ratio of benefits to us, and benefits to our insurance overlords has shrunk to less than 1:1.

Enough.

Keith Olbermann\'s diary :: ::

At the risk of sounding as if I\'ve just stepped out of \"Blazing Saddles,\" Howard Dean is right, and the White House\'s reaction to him has been incendiary, short-sighted, and inaccurate. He argued not just to kill the bill but to salvage its societally useful components through reconciliation.

That this is a turning point in the Obama Presidency is so obvious to be almost mundane.

The \"men\" of the current moment, have lost to the \"mice\" of history. They must now not make the defeat worse by passing a hollow shell of a bill just for the sake of a big-stage signing ceremony. This bill, slowly bled to death by the political equivalent of the leeches that were once thought state-of-the-art-medicine, is now little more than a series of microscopically minor tweaks of a system which is the real-life, here-and-now version, of the malarkey of the Town Hallers. The American Insurance Cartel is the Death Panel, and this Senate bill does nothing to destroy it. Nor even to satiate it.

It merely decrees that our underprivileged, our sick, our elderly, our middle class, can be fed into it, as human sacrifices to the great maw of corporate voraciousness, at a profit per victim of 10 cents on the dollar instead of the current 20.

With great sadness - and with full acknowledgment that this is hardly all his doing - I must also address this president directly, about his lack of leadership.


There is no middle to coalesce here, Sir.

There are only the uninformed, the bought-off, and the vast suffering majority for whom the urgency of now is a call from a collection agency or a threat of rescission of policy or a warning of expiration of services.
Sir, your hands-off approach, while nobly intended and perhaps yet some day applicable to the reality of an improved version of our nation, enabled the national humiliation that was the Town Halls and the insufferable Neanderthalian stupidity of Congressman Wilson and the street-walking of Mr. Lieberman.
Instead of continuing this snipe-hunt for the endangered and possibly extinct creature \"bipartisanship,\" you need to push the Republicans around or cut them out or both. You need to threaten Democrats like Baucus and the others with the ends of their careers in the party. Instead, those Democrats have threatened you, and the Republicans have pushed you and cut you out.

Sir, if they are going to call you a socialist no matter what you do, you have been given full unfettered freedom to do what you know is just. The bill may be the ultimate political manifesto, or it may be the most delicate of compromises. The firestorm will be the same. So why not give the haters, as the cliché goes, something to cry about.

There are many who can act here but the leadership must come from the White House, or we will see enacted into statute the equivalent of Medical Mobster Protection Money, the forced purchase of a product, by the citizens of this country, which is significantly regulated only in the establishment of a law requiring us to buy it.

And in that event, I feel - and will express tonight - the necessity of violating any such law, as obviously, frequently, and loudly as possible.

http://www.dailykos.com

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