How Obama is Failing with Health Care Reform

This from Alternet:

The real economic spillovers and side effects of Wall Street-leverage and rocket-science concoctions brought the curtain down on the romance with the unfettered free market. This was a mess that did not need to happen. It was a calamity that will cost the world economy trillions of dollars.

This is the stage that President Obama walked onto when he made his run and was elected to the White House. Government romance had been pounded out of the hearts of Americans for decades. Yet now free market fantasies were in tatters. For Obama, seeds of opportunity were contained in the crisis.

What was remarkable about Obama was his seemingly magical ability to inspire us all to suspend our cynicism about civic engagement and government and give things a new try. Sure, he had help from the dreadful examples of his predecessor's work on Katrina, Iraq, torture and the TARP bailout. Yet he pulled it off, and the idea of a strong leader steering us through a crisis brought visions of FDR into the minds of many.

We took comfort in the notion that "the best and brightest" would be taking over. The Administration promised bold actions on many fronts, including stimulus, climate change, financial regulation, bailout policy and healthcare.

[...]Instead, we got nothing on inauguration day. We got a plan-to-have-a-plan in early February, followed by the announcement of PPIP and infinite forbearance through an intravenous-drip system of capital injections so that the behemoth banks, their executives, their stockholders -- and most profoundly, their unsecured creditors -- could hold onto their money. We got that, coupled with the announcement of AIG bonuses. As a final insult, we heard Administration officials waxing on about the sanctity of contracts while the autoworkers' benefits and pensions were being restructured. The public was rightly enraged.

Obama's own party is confused by the President's lack of leadership on health care:

President Obama can still secure major health-care legislation this year if he learns from his mistakes in recent months and spends more time reminding Americans why they were once eager for fundamental change.

His White House lost sight of the need to make a strong case that reform would deliver specific benefits to the insured as well as the uninsured. Absent a consistent set of arguments from reformers, advocates of the status quo filled the vacuum -- often with outright lies.

The administration also sent mixed and confusing signals about its position on a public insurance option. This set off a liberal firestorm and increased the role that the public option played in the public debate -- which, paradoxically, is exactly the opposite of what Obama's lieutenants intended.

And his aides did not foresee just how fraught the situation would become in the Senate, where Max Baucus, the Democratic chairman of the Finance Committee, allowed Charles Grassley, the committee's ranking Republican, to string negotiations along indefinitely without making any commitment to voting for a bill.

Senate leaders signaled Obama as early as June that they wanted him to intervene more actively to push Baucus along. The administration held back, hoping it could postpone its most forceful involvement until after both the Senate and the House had passed bills. But Baucus's failure to produce a proposal before the summer recess added to the sense of legislative chaos and bred uncertainty as to what reformers are seeking.