Obama the strategist

Obama the strategist

by sujigu

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The Affordable Care Act comes first to mind, especially with this clause that health care providers need to take 80%-85% of their incoming dollars and make sure it actually goes to care as opposed to overhead, which could be sales/marketing/solid gold toilet paper. Insuring people with pre-existing conditions and expanding insurance to cover minors until age 26 under their parents plan was one thing, but this bomb really struck me. The health care bill was difficult to push through a Congress with blue dogs worried about the deficit. The analysis has been that the law instigated the far right, paving the way for the Koch Bros. to lay down their astroturf for the Tea Party buses to come rolling through. The misinformation machine of Faux News went into full spin mode with Glenn Beck the false prophet. If only Obama had messaged it correctly, to make it clear to the American people what they were getting out of the deal and how he would've solved the problem, everyone would've left the confines of their town halls and everything would have been better is the common wisdom. "How could the Hope and Change guy fail so hardcore at messaging?" We then hear about liberal dissatisfaction with a public option (rightfully so), and we have the picture of a president who punches hippies while drowning in the red tide of the Tea Party.

I don't buy that. Obama's strategy is a bit deeper. He does things long term. It's not perfect, don't misread me here, but I like it in that so far despite the resounding offensive against his idea, it's standing up. He needed blue dogs to get on board and he knew that the deficit was going to be the next hot topic of debate. The Tea Party had already been brewing. I have little evidence it took him completely by surprise, and despite the fact that we laughed at Sharon Engle and Christine O'Donnell, the right wing wave of 2010 wasn't too difficult to predict. Maybe not in its entirety, but Democrats were already heading for the hills. Better to get the law through at that time then to have it drowned out once the Tea Party Express started rolling through the streets. It's a highly corporatist bill, with many good criticisms, including the lack of sufficient existing health care infrastructure, constitutionality of the mandate, and questions on long term care and price controls. A single payer system would most likely be the best way, but from a pragmatists perspective, it has to first get made law, then be impervious to repeal (both in that it cannot be repealed, or that repealing it is worse than leaving it in), then tested for its constitutionality, then survive the "real life" test where it has to be implemented by real, living, breathing people.

The health care law mandates digitizing records and has started a new, burgeoning industry of Health Information Technology. Stimulus funds went to training people by giving them 6 month certificates and retooling existing professionals to make jobs that easily make at least $20/hr for people with minimal certification. So when it's implemented, no one will be able to say, "You didn't think this through effectively enough," or "Look at this mess! People's records are being lost or destroyed! You've forced a tidal wave on us and it's all your fault!" So, we cleared this hurdle.

Then there were the waivers. That was brilliant; one of my favorite Obama moments ever. The look on the Republican governor's faces when he essentially said: "If you can do better, then go ahead," were beyond priceless. Checkmate bitches. Obama loves to net his opponent in a web of hypocrisy, and the GOP is almost always too eager to oblige. If they do not develop public options, and many of those federal dollar-loving red states cannot or will not implement better-than-mandate options, due to the fact they loathe raising taxes, they'll easily take the exchange dollars and the grants while simultaneously declaring him a Kenyan Marxist with anti-colonial views. More fodder for local newspapers outlining what I love to call "stimulus hypocrisy." Plus, and this gets even better, people who CAN come up with public options will be free to do so and be given ample time to develop them to serve as models that "Hey, I know the public option smacked of spending blue dogs, but these states made it work, and will have visible results, so why don't you go ahead and copy them?" Governor Schweitzer, master of the Democrat-sounding-like-a-Republican strategy, was able to sell it to his constituents, instead of having Obama try to connect to voters who seemed to prefer their local leaders to him.

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