Rants of Rob

Progressive Politics and Culture

Posts Tagged alan grayson

A Star is Born

Oct 11

Posted by Rob Field in Florida, Politics | No Comments

At the 2009 Florida State Democratic Conference on Saturday, the organizers arranged the usual dog-and-pony show, putting telegenic Democrats on giant screens in front of cheering Democrats in what can only be described as a sporting event. Every forceful phrase was rewarded with applause and cheers. There is always something North Korean about the atmosphere at a party event. During Bill Nelson’s address, however, the North Korean vibe was broken by hundreds of angry hecklers screaming “Public Option!” at every pause in the Senator’s remarks. Nelson kept to his rambling speech, talking about everything but the issue on everyone’s mind, even taking refuge in a gratuitous display of Obama-humping over the catcalls. Finally, he came to the subject of the health care bill to cheers and more calls of “Public Option!” When Nelson pledged to support a watered-down version of the public option proposed by New York Senator Chuck Schumer, the crowd let him finish in peace.

Next to speak was 8th District Congressman Alan Grayson, who recently opined that the Republican health reform plan was for sick people to die quickly. The crowd lost its collective senses. Wild applause filled the hall. I had thought that party leaders may have been nervous about Grayson’s incendiary language, but they were clearly encouraging it by giving him a prime time slot after the keynote. Grayson, of course, stole the show, repeating his greatest hits to wild acclaim and clearly eating it up. He proposed that the Democratic Party be renamed the Conscience Party and the Republican Party the Party of Selfishness. The language came off a bit cynical and pandering, but the crowd was wholly uncritical. There’s no doubt there’s a great deal of sincere feeling behind Grayson’s rhetoric, but the simplicity of the language seems crafted. He was one of the few mainstream Southern Democrats in recent years to approach a critique of conservatism itself. Grayson’s popularity holds out hope of a new era of Progressive dominance in the Party.

The Congressman has been making the rounds on television and distributing his clips on the Web. His fundraising has been brisk, and it appears he will not have to use his own money this cycle. Of course, Congressman Grayson’s popularity comes at a bad time. He probably will not enter the Senate race this late, and the next shot will be Nelson’s seat in 2012. He might take it, but the Party would seek to stop him. The only other prize is re-election, which seems like a lot of effort for a small reward. Acclaim like this never lasts.

One wonders if this was calculated or just, as one observer out it, “Alan being Alan.”

Tags: , , ,

The Myth of Bipartisanship

Oct 6

Posted by Rob Field in Florida, Politics | 2 Comments

225px-Alan_GraysonWe have been assaulted for more than a year with the most extreme claims about the President. He was a secret extremist Muslim, we were told. No, a radical black supremacist Christian, wait, a socialist terror sympathizer. When he won the election last fall, I was stupid enough to believe that the rhetoric had peaked. Hah!

When he proposed the centerpiece of his domestic agenda, he carefully adhered to his campaign pledge of apolitical politics. He sat the “stakeholders” (vested financial interests, not the patients whose lives were at stake) at the table and gave away the winning run before kickoff. Single-payer proposals that would have improved standards of care, controlled costs, and guaranteed universal access were abandoned in favor of a wishy-washy “public option” that would accomplish none of those things. He declared again and again his intention to reach a “bipartisan” deal with Republicans in Congress, bending over backwards to avoid pissing off conservatives.

So, of course, town halls across America were surrounded by gangs of lunatics toting guns, warning of looming totalitarianism, and comparing our soft-spoken moderate President to Hitler. The lunacy was not limited to the parking lots, either. Republican lawmakers were gleefully spreading sleaze about “death panels” and decrying Democrats’ non-existent intention to “pull the plug on Grandma.” So much for the tone.

So, when Congressman Alan Grayson suggested that the Republicans’ Health Care Plan was for sick people to “die quickly,” I was shocked to hear Republicans complain about the incivility of it all. What national debate on health care were they watching? Perhaps they had stepped through an inter-dimensional rift from a parallel Earth where they had not spent the summer inciting domestic terrorists to kill Democratic politicians.

Congressman Grayson’s remark was relatively civil, by the standards of this debate. It was also relatively factual. Although prone to superficial stunts, Mr. Grayson’s commitment to his constituents is undeniable. He is rightly concerned about a monstrously dysfunctional health care system that is simply unsustainable.  The loss of life from our broken system is equivalent to 15 9-11s every year. This is an absurd and intolerable situation, and the Congressman’s edgy rhetoric is more than justified. While the Republicans chase phantom nightmares of totalitarianism, Americans are subjected to a kafkaesque labyrinth of insurance company rules as they watch their husbands and wives, their children and brothers, their fathers, sisters and mothers die when basic medical care could have saved their lives.

Courageous Progressives like Mr. Grayson are to be congratulated, but more importantly, they need our support. Please make sure the Republicans can’t knock him off next year by donating today.

Forget bipartisanship. To steal from Aaron Sorkin, our job is not to end the fight. It’s to win it. Hundreds of thousands of lives are in the balance, as is the economic security of our nation.

Tags: , , , ,

How We Lost The Public Option

Aug 18

Posted by Rob Field in Culture, Florida, Politics | 2 Comments

Secretary Sebelius on Sunday claimed that the public health insurance option is “not an essential element” of health care reform. President Obama said at a town hall on Saturday that the public option was just “one sliver” of reform. This could hardly be more wrong. A universally accessible public option would give low-income people too rich for Medicaid access to meaningful health insurance and is the only way to approach universal access to insurance without a mandate or single-payer.

The wave of chronic conditions America faces over the rest of the century demand early detection and intervention to control the costs and misery that they produce. Gaps and lapses in coverage will make those diseases more expensive for those patients and the rest of us. Preventing those gaps in coverage will require serving the low-income patients currently ill-served by the current mix of overstretched public programs and private high-deductible plans and still bend the cost curve down. That will require a plan that can deliver overhead in the 3-6% range. Only a public plan can do that.

The best solution would have been to put the entire population on a very low overhead plan. This was HR 676, Medicare for Everybody, Single-Payer. It never had a chance. Both Houses “placed it off the table” before negotiations began. The reasons for that decision are irrelevant, its consequences are all too clear. Moderate Democrats now pronounce the barely adequate public option DOA in the Senate. Without single-payer to draw fire, the opposition can focus on defeating the public plan option, If they had focused their energy on the socialism (i.e., public policy with which conservatives disagree) of single-payer health care, we could respond with the massive market reform of retaining the entire private health insurance with a single public program with subsidies for those who earn up to 4 times the localized poverty rate. Conservatives would hail this as a leg-up to the middle class, rather than welfare. We would have gotten the public plan we wanted, with ribbons affixed. They would hail their great market-driven defeat of the evil socialism of the hated liberals and declare it a great victory,

Instead we took the bogeyman away before the game started, leaving the public option as the target of the antis. We did so hoping to make them pros. This was possibly the most naive moment in contemporary American politics. The antis are anti not because of the actuarial tables or because Ludwig Von Mises hated regulation, but because we’re not them. We can’t be trusted to worship at the alter of God, CEO, therefore we are the enemy of all that is fine and good.

President Obama and Congressional leadership egregiously underestimated the irrational sectarian motivations of their opponents and chose to try to accomodate them, which merely served to slide the agenda rightward while buying nothing we couldn’t already take were we willing to ignore those we beat in November, as they have done to us and will again.

Thus are 22,000 Americans a year sacrificed to the demon of “Dear God, don’t let us be seen being Democrats.” God Bless America.

Tags: , , , ,