Obama, Genius or Wimp?

[jpmassar]

There are at least two ways of looking at the Senate Health Care deal

Comments

[prock]

You forgot to put "whore" in your poll.

[adb_jaeger]

He's a politician. It's understood.

[prock]

As true as that is, it's certainly more true of Obama.

[jpmassar]

And socialist, traitor, liar, non-American-citizen and half-breed.

[kalimac]

"it was a masterful, orchestrated effort to get as much as could
possibly be gotten within the constraints of political reality."

I reject this argument. That requires pushing and wiliness. There has been none of either.

Obama is a sensible, intelligent man who thinks that sensible, intelligent people should just sit down and work their way through our problems. Unfortunately, we have to deal with politics. I thought he realized this problem when he hired the crafty Rahm Emanuel, but apparently not.

[jpmassar]

Well, playing devil's advocate, Rahm got him his 60 votes. And his stimulus package, without 60 Dem caucus members.

If anything, the argument is that Rahm is far too willing to play politics rather than take principled stands.

[kalimac]

If he would play politics, rather than let people run over him, I'd understand. But this bowing and cavorting to the random changing whims of Joe, Ben, Kent, and Olympia is obscene. Do a deal. It's not just about what you want from them, but what they want from you.

Also, this whole idea of "60 votes is the name of the game" is a brand-new re-interpretation of the cloture rules, invented by the Republicans, January A.D. 2009. And everyone has just let them do it, and acting as if it's always been that way! In the past there's always been a sharp distinction between the circumstances of invoking cloture and the question of actually voting for the bill. It's possible, you know, for the administration to put pressure on the Republicans to revert to normality.

[jpmassar]

Really

[jpmassar]

Interesting.

Even if I don't agree with it, I thought I made a reasonable case for 'genius', but no one agrees with that line of argument.

Perhaps the implications of 'genius' were too strong.

[prock]

When "the best deal he could have gotten" is worse than the status quo, it's hard to label it as genius.

[adb_jaeger]

And if there's any doubt about who the big winners are, look at the stocks.

I'm just pissed I only bought big pharma, and not also insurers.

[barking_iguana]

The recent movement of the insurance stocks have not gone up more than the market. Sure, they don't like the public option. And overall, the regulations on the insurance companies might or moght not outweigh the additional customers. But so what? I'm pretty far to the left, but punishing corporations, however awful they may be in this industry, is not high on my priority list. I'm much more concerned with the effect it will have on people who don't own stocks.