Replies to post #137152 on Tornado Alley (PROG)

[StephanieVanbryce]

Obama’s Character And The Progressives Who Resent It

... there's so many different perspectives of things
that I forget to think about



Rich Ungar Apr. 14 2011 - 1:25 pm

It wasn’t just that the President of the United States drew that proverbial line in the sand by stating his firm refusal to continue the Bush tax cuts one moment longer than legally required.

And it wasn’t just Obama’s taking a solid stand when he said “Not while I’m President” to the GOP budget plan that would break the nation’s most basic cultural commitments by destroying Medicare and dramatically curtailing Medicaid, all to provide still more tax breaks to the richest Americans.

What did it for me in Obama’s plan to get the nation’s finances in order was that the President took his stand against the GOP effort to take away the soul of this nation while staring directly into the eyes of Rep. Paul Ryan- the architect of the document that would remake this country in the mold of third world nations where there are rich people and poor people with nobody in the middle.

Unlike the taunts, personal insults and barbs that Ryan and his companions lob at the president on a daily basis from the safety of a television studio, Obama took the route that requires character.

He did it to Ryan’s face.

The President invited the Wisconsin congressman, and a few of his congressional confederates, to attend the speech, placed them right up front and proceeded to call these people out for the hegemony they would visit on millions of Americans to benefit their wealthy political patrons with a trillion more in tax cuts.

Character.

There was nothing in the President’s speech that came as a big surprise. Obama is a reasonable adult with a pretty well honed sense of fairness. His proposal of a balanced approach to the problem – one that would require three dollars of budget cuts for every one dollar of increased taxes on the wealthy- is exactly what I would have expected from him.

What the speech really did was reinforce what I continue to believe is this president’s most valuable asset – character. It is a trait of Barack Obama’s that is too often forgotten by progressives and conservatives alike. While you may not always – or ever – like Barack Obama’s policies, he has shown, time and again, that his decisions reflect a willingness to do what he believes is right while taking the political hits that come with courageous decisions.

President John F. Kennedy once pointed out that being president is all about choosing between the many bad options that are available.

This reality was never brought into sharper focus than last December when Obama elected to suffer the slings and arrows fired at him by his own supporters by swallowing hard and agreeing to the extension of the Bush tax credits.

Anyone who truly understood what was at issue in that fight- and the incredibly difficult choices available to the President – understands that Obama chose to pay the political price in order to ensure that millions of Americans who are out of work would continue to get their unemployment benefits. He was willing to take the hit from those who are supposed to be his friends so that he could protect the already suffering middle class from having to pay for the President’s political safety in the guise of the tax increases that were threatened for those who could least afford them.

That took character.

I was angry with progressives for their willingness to put someone else’s money where their mouth is.

As I wrote at the time, it’s awfully easy to demand that the President stay true to his progressive roots and go to the mats with the Republicans as you sip a fine glass of wine with your friends inside a cozy bistro. Meanwhile, as you enjoy the conversation and drinks, you don’t even notice that poor fellow outside the bar who is offering to shovel driveways to make a few bucks so he can put a cheap dinner on the table for his children. He’s the one who lost his job and, if progressives had their way, would have been cut off from the only financial lifeline he had -all so that the liberals could feel more righteous in their willingness to battle the GOP using the snow shoveler’s money-not their own.

That is not progressive behavior- that is elitist behavior.

The wine drinkers were not the ones on the President’s mind last December. It was the cold guy on the outside who was the focus of Obama’s attention-and that is precisely as it should have been.

Character.

As for the president’s budget proposals, we can expect the right wing to release the dogs. That attack is well underway, beginning with Rep. Ryan’s expressing his hurt feelings over the President inviting him to the speech only to insult him to his face.

That figures.

Ryan simply can’t relate to someone who stands up to you in person rather than firing salvos from behind protective barriers.

But it is not the conservative attacks that concern me. I’m far more focused on the progressives who are already expressing their disappointment over Obama’s failure to re-introduce the public option as a way of cutting health care costs or believe the President was just too darn rational in his proposals – thus leaving what they believe to be too little negotiating room for the battles to come.

This from an article entitled “Obama’s Speech Another Meaningless Line In the Sand” by Justin Krebs, co-founder and director of Living Liberally, a progressive non-profit. [ http://www.wnyc.org/blogs/its-free-blog/2011/apr/14/obamas-speech-another-meaningless-line-sand/

We liberals are finally learning what conservatives have said all along: Ignore the President’s pretty speeches and judge him by his actions.

Of course, liberals and conservatives are judging from two very different directions. While criticism from the Right sees him as a socialist-leaning bleeding-heart, we on the Left wish he were what the Tea Party accuses him of. Instead, we see a President that continues to adopt conservative frames, extend Republican wars (and start one of his own), and buy into the advice of a coterie of Wall Street executives. The proud progressive we wanted to elect never put single-payer healthcare on the table, hasn’t fought for meaningful mortgage reform and didn’t draw a line in the sand when it came to allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire.

Well, he did draw a line in the sand… but seems to think of it as his starting line for compromise, which is how the Bush-era give-away to our wealthiest citizens continued while Democrats controlled both houses of Congress and the White House.

What progressives like Mr. Krebs consistently forget is that Obama has another virtue in addition to character – he knows how to add.

The President can manage to work out that, if he is to get anything done, he has to get a vote through the House of Representatives where the vote totals are stacked against him.

So, you ask, why didn’t he get his way when the Democrats controlled both houses in Congress?

Because the President can also add to 60- the number of votes he needs to accomplish anything in the Senate where the filibuster results in minority rule. All it takes is 41 ‘nays’ and the best-laid progressive plans go down the drain.

If you recall, there was a point in time when the President had 58 Democratic votes plus 2 independents in the Senate, giving him the appearance of being ‘filibuster-proof.”

However, he also had a few Blue Dog Democrats who knew that a vote with Obama was a nail in the coffin containing their own political futures. Which do you imagine was always destined to win out? Obama’s progressive plans or a Senator’s career?

The president has only one way to get something done– go directly to the people in the hope that they will have the good sense to support his rational approach and ask them to push their elected representatives to do the same. I think we can all agree that “rational” is not something the President can expect in Congress without outside pressure from the voters.

Yesterday, Barack Obama took his arguments directly to the people. Now, let’s see if the Congressional Republicans and progressives alike care to listen to the result.

I think the majority of Americans will agree with the President’s approach to our financial problems. Why? Because they know that character and clarity counts in a President.

Yesterday’s speech revealed that Obama has more than enough of both.

http://blogs.forbes.com/rickungar/2011/04/14/obamas-character-and-the-progressives-who-resent-it/

[PegnVA]

In today's Wash Post's columnist Allen Sloan talks about Ryan's plan to "reform" Medicare and his claim that seniors would benefit by having the same as members of Congress.
This claim is deceitful - the avg Medicare recipient does not have a staff of professionals with the time and competence to analyze various plans and does not have the means to chose the best coverage; millions of seniors would settle for less-expensive plans and find the coverage less than adequate when needed.

[F6]

Cantor: Private healthcare rationing better than government's

By Julian Pecquet - 05/03/11 03:21 PM ET

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) said Tuesday that private healthcare plans ration care for profit but that consumers should be free to buy whatever coverage they can afford rather than depend on government rationing.

In remarks to the College of American Pathologists, Cantor warned that Democrats' healthcare reform law mandates benefits that are too generous and will bankrupt the country as the government ends up having to offer ever increasing subsidies. That can only lead to government rationing, he said.

"That doesn't mean those kinds of decisions aren't being made now by the private sector," Cantor added, "because they are."

The solution advanced by Republicans is to increase private-sector competition, by allowing health plans to sell their coverage across state lines, for example. Most experts say that's unlikely to significantly drive down America's record-high healthcare costs, however, and risks leaving in place the current problems of uninsured and underinsured patients that the healthcare reform law attempted to address in the first place.

Cantor appeared to go further than Republicans have in the past by acknowledging that not all patients are certain to get optimal healthcare under a system of private insurance.

"I think that the fundamental nature of our system of third-party payer is the problem," he said. Patients, he added, too often are left with "no decision about what they want and what they can afford."

Later, Cantor said Republicans want a safety net for people who can't afford care but that "we're not for everyone having the same outcome guaranteed."

[...]

© 2011 Capitol Hill Publishing Corp., a subsidiary of News Communications, Inc. (emphasis added) (. . .)

http://thehill.com/blogs/healthwatch/health-reform-implementation/158979-cantor-private-healthcare-rationing-better-than-governments [with comments]