Grass-roots groups must test President mettle on health care reform
By Errol Lewis
New York Daily News
Thursday, June 4th 2009, 4:00 AM
WASHINGTON - As the White House launches its bid to reform health care, the big questions bedeviling the activist base of the Democratic Party are how and when to nudge President Obama to the left on key issues.
The recent three-day conference of the Campaign for America’s Future - an amalgamation of hundreds of unions, advocacy groups, student organizations, liberal think tanks and anti-war organizations whose turnout helped elect Democrats from coast to coast - featured a vow to get behind Obama’s push to reform health care this year.
But the frenetic energy of last year’s conference and about 500 attendees were missing. So was a hoped-for cameo appearance by Obama, who as a candidate dazzled the crowd at past conferences.
Many progressives have concluded correctly that Obama’s penchant for compromise and consensus could lead to a complex, unworkable, hybrid public-private health care proposal that will be an easy target for pharmaceutical industry lobbyists and other entrenched interests to demonize, weaken and possibly kill.
The stakes could not be higher. Tens of millions of Americans lack coverage, and the cost of health care continues to soar by double-digit percentages, causing an estimated half of all personal bankruptcies.
Although polls suggest that a thin majority of Americans would support a single, Medicare-style health insurance plan that covers everybody, Obama is playing it safe politically by going for a hybrid proposal in which those who are happy with their current coverage could keep it without any changes. That option, according to the polls, brings public support to 77%.
That leaves single-payer supporters in the tricky position of wanting to put pressure on Obama without providing ammunition to his (and their) conservative adversaries.
There’s a fine art, and long history, of Presidents being pressured by the social movements that helped elect them. “Obama’s Challenge,” a book making the rounds in progressive circles for months, describes how movement pressure made Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan into great, transformational Presidents.
According to this reading of history, the abolitionists pushed Lincoln from the goal of saving the union to the more radical move of ending slavery. Labor activism moved FDR from halting the Depression to enacting the New Deal, and civil rights activism forced Johnson to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965, breaking the back of legalized segregation.
Presidents need outside grass-roots heat to help move the national consensus. The dreaded scenario for progressives is the arm’s-length treatment the anti-abortion movement got from Reagan.
Every year, the anti-abortion forces would gather on the National Mall, and every year Reagan would address them via a phone link and promise action on a constitutional amendment to ban abortion that never got to first base.
“We’ve seen little evidence of a progressive movement that can challenge the limits of Obama’s agenda and rouse an aggrieved citizenry to open up the space for the President to act far more boldly,” is how Robert Borosage, co-director of the Campaign for America’s Future, put it in a recent blog post. “But anyone building that movement will have to understand that they might earn respect, but they won’t be loved in the White House.”
The question is whether progressive health care advocates want to make friends with Obama, or make history. We shall see.