Ineffectual

To say that Barack Obama has more hat and less cattle than George Bush is…saying a lot, but I’m really beginning to wonder if I’m going to start feeling sorry for the guy, involuntarily and against my better judgment, long, long before his term is up.    This health care reform effort has been…disastrous, a train wreck of unforced errors, utterly incompetent, yet Obama remains “cautiously optimistic” even still.  I guess Turkana was right: Just pass a sense of the Congress that “Health Care is Good” and call it a fucking day.  Are Barack and Rahm really bumping dickheads over this–I can’t call it a complete failure, because there was so little effort to accomplish anything-but seriously professor, you’re handing this in as homework?

aimai runs it down at nomoremister.blogspot.com:

The problem the Democrats are having with this bill is that they oversold what they would do, and underfought the bill–very, very, very, publicly. Obama came in with a huge reservoir of good will and a big rolodex of names and friends to push for the policies he said he wanted. Health Care Reform was one of his signature issues and he immiediately set about talking, in very vague terms, about getting it done. For pretty good policy reasons he nominally turned it over to the House and Senate to “get it done” while setting out, broadly, some guidelines about what he thought should be in the bill. Those guidelines, of course, ought to have been the most comprehensive, well thought, out, clearly stated set of bullet points he could have come up with. Because those guidelines were what Obama and the Democrats were going to be campaigning on. Those would be “the bill” as far as the public was concerned.

From the get go they refused to aggressively market a single set of bullet points that were clear, cogent, and defensible. Then they refused to activate their own activist network. They refused to demonize a subset of their opposition to force another subset to compromise. They didn’t drum up enough support in the country as a whole–for instance, they didn’t back and organize the free health clinics that we later saw emerge. They allowed Baucus to move from a supporter to an enemy of reform and to drag the entire process out of whack in August. They didn’t organize and orchestrate the August Town Halls and they let them be taken over by the Tea Partiers. Because of their own refusal to activate Obama’s network–which came about because they didn’t want to back actually popular reforms and were wedded to the most insurance friendly set of minor tinkers–they lost the August recess. They didn’t send the Democratic Senators and House members out with a single set of talking points. They didn’t strong arm the weak or conservative members of their own caucus.

Worse, they undercut and undersold the most progressive members of both the Senate and the House while cozening up to, and bargaining with, Pharma, the Insurance Companies, the Hospitals, the Blue Dogs, Baucus, Lieberman, Snowe, Collins, and all the rest of them. When progressives warned them not to let Baucus push the Senate bill farther and farther out that was ignored. In the House the blue dogs were given benefits and attention that the progressive caucus never was, and the progressives found themselves outgunned and outmaneuvered on Stupak. Then we were all promised that, somehow, things would be fixed in the conference report. Now, of course, we are being told that there won’t be any conference report, or at any rate that to placate the worst elements of the Senate and the House there is no chance of ameliorating the worst bits of either bill.

And now Obama goes hat in hand to the progressives and begs them to back the bill right now?

Obama’s effort on a signature issue has been  truly pathetic.

Meanwhile, the banksters continue pissing on Barack Obama’s shoes, even after he put on a public show to berate them for their financial malpractice.

… Said one CEO who attended: “I expected to be taken to the woodshed, but the tone was quite the opposite.”

Said another senior exec with knowledge of the meeting: “The whole thing was so telegraphed that not much was accomplished, other than giving Obama a PR stunt … He might have sounded mean on ’60 Minutes,’ but during the meeting he was a hell of a lot nicer.”

So far, the dude’s been painfully ineffectual.  Health care and job prospects suggest a fucking blowout in 2010.