“Look, the fact of the matter is there are not the votes in the United States Senate for the public option.” - Kent Conrad (D-North Dak). 7/16/09
OK. So what the fuck is the point of voting for the Democratic Party? If the Democrats can't pass low-hanging fruit like a public option (similar to RomneyCare in Mass), with a filibuster-proof 60 seat majority, what is the use?
I can already hear the litany of excuses from some on the liberal left to explain why the public option crashed and burned. But this is not only the doing of a handful of conservative Democrats in the Senate. This is a deep institutional problem with the Democratic Party, with our electoral procedures, with the weight of economic power that prevails within our political institutions.
I hate that I was right about this, but I recall being totally alienated at the Obama victory-rally amidst huge numbers of elated people in the streets. I recall feeling stressed, thinking to myself: all of this energy has been spent for this moment, but this moment is only (at best) the opening of a small amount of space for other things to happen. And what's going to ensure that they do?
Yeah. I'm pretty pissed at Obama for not drafting legislation and handing it to the Dems before starting all this town hall BS.
ReplyDeleteYea, I agree with you. The town hall thing is such a boneheaded concept: they are patronizing, fake and useless as means of collecting information about public sentiment. Legislators don't hold them so that they can actually learn what their constituents think; there are far more effective means of doing that. They hold them for 'symbolic' reasons, but those reasons strike me as bankrupt and, like i said above, patronizing.
ReplyDeleteAnd as a tactical move... they seem to have totally crashed and burned.
I also agree that Obama should have put together a more firm plan and attempted to explain it more clearly. Most americans still don't understand what his plan consists of.