Sep 07 2009

Obama and the ProgCauc Win The Battle for the White House

Simulposted at DailyKos

With one sentence from today’s speech:


And I continue to believe that a public option within the basket of insurance choices would help improve quality and bring down costs.

No waffling, no ‘slivers,’ no qualifications. No more trial balloons. As strong and direct a statement as, heh, Obama is capable of making.

He will NOT allow Rahm and Axelrod to compromise away the Public Option. The battle of The White House, compromise vs standing firm on the PO, has been won.

Principle over “Pragmatism.” Real reality in giving the Voters what they overwhelmingly want as opposed to the faux reality of the Teabaggers and Town-hallers…and the Republicans who tried to use them to get Obama to abandon the Public Option. Standing firm when a seemingly huge contingent of Baucus’s and Grassley’s and Nelson’s….and Rahm’s…. were pushing another Democratic Cave.

The Progressive Caucus stood firm in the face of in favor of yet another case of Democrats attempting to cave in to themselves…..and they won.

The forces that urged him to compromise in the face of no real opposition have lost.

The Progressive Caucus, The DFH Bloggers and….The American People have won.

He IS standing with the Progressive Caucus in demanding the Public Option.

He IS standing with the bloggers in demanding the Public Option.

He IS standing with The American People, over the Insurance Companies and lobbyists.

And he is doing so with fire in his eye….at last. Today’s speech was a FIGHTING speech, as we have urged.

Let’s support him and bury him in carrots in hope that that fire will carry over to Wednesday night.

And let us all rise and sing songs of praise to (and fill the coffers of!)or Magnificent Progressive Caucus! If they had not stood firm, we would NOT have won the Battle of the White House!

18 comments

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  1. Photobucket

  2. Im not counting any chicks til they actually hatch out.

  3. Our PUBLIC OPTION needs to be AFFORDABLE and it needs to be available to EVERYONE on DAY ONE and not some JIVE-ASS garbage about waiting until 2013 for it to serve 10% of the American public!

    We need a ROBUST public option, not one which is written into the bill in order to quiet the critics of Congress!

  4. Public Option is compromise already and not a good one if you’d ask me! Nobody ever asks me! Why?

    He campaigned on Single Payer! He let Van Jones walk!

    It’s an empty victory with no meaning at all! We have won diddly-squat!

    Empty words, he’s good at that and he knows we love them words. O is an empty suit and you know it, budhy.

    Bad Religion said it best:

    There’s hope in the words and emotion in the eyes

    it’s so easy to be misled by the savvy gentle guise

    and like fools we trust the delivery

    but it’s all just drunk sincerity

  5. Democrats line up in punt formation, and saying, ” I continue to believe we need a touchdown.”

    I just don’t see how that statement of Obama’s or anything else he said in that speech can be interpreted as him demanding the public option.

    This looks more to me like Obama’s trying to placate the left by saying he believes in the public option while inferring that it’s up to Congress to decide whether they’ll send him a bill with the public option in it.

    He’s the leader of the Democratic Party, he’s the President of the United States, he needs to start conducting himself accordingly, he needs to assert his authority and tell Congress what he expects to be in the bill.

    He still isn’t doing that.  

  6. “I will veto any POS HCR Bill that lands on my desk that includes mandates and lacks a Public Option.”

    ?

    You can start crowin’ about how we’ve “won” when we hear him say that.

  7. I am back and forth on whether you really are totally deluded or whether this is a brilliant piece of sarcasm.

  8. Just like the “impossibility” of Single Payer, the Public Option has been so gutted in behind-closed-doors secret meetings that it looks to be worse than nothing. Writing in truthdig, Bill Boyarsky says:Don’t Be Fooled by the Public Option

    The fight over the public option has occupied much of the media coverage, but left unsaid is the fact that weeks of behind-the-scenes negotiations have weakened the public option proposal to the point that it is hardly an option at all.

    I discussed the matter with Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio. Kucinich favors universal health insurance coverage, not the public option. So do I.

    Kucinich continues that members of Congress are being left out of the final, revised writing of the bill.  Congress members like Kucinich don’t know what is in this version:

    A health care reform bill was approved by the House Energy and Commerce Committee in July. Kucinich said that a final version-the real bill-is now being rewritten and will be presented to committee chairs and other leaders, who will bring the revised version to the House floor. “It’s happening now,” he said. “It’s being done by the leadership, and we [members of Congress] don’t know what’s going on.”

    The article cncludes:

    Kucinich doesn’t like the secret process. Neither does a newspaper that seldom, if ever, agrees with him on anything: The Wall Street Journal. Noting that President Barack Obama has complained that critics have misrepresented him, the paper said, “Who’s to know what’s reality and what’s a myth when the public and Members of Congress aren’t able to read a bill that would restructure one-seventh of our economy.”

    So far, the loser in this game of backroom politics is the consumer or, in this case, the patient. The winner is the medical care industry.

    President Obama is scheduled to speak to Congress on Wednesday on the issue. He’ll have to assure the rest of us that we’ll be winners, too.

    So, buhdy, I guess I agree with the skeptics here.  And I join RUkind in suggesting a cold shower.  Maybe I’m wrong.

    Time will tell.

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