They Never Believed Cassandra, Either

While I've gone on quite too far at length about Joe F'ckin Lieberman's easily called backstab this week (and hey look, he's not ruling out running as a Republican in 2012, surprise!) it's important to note that Liebergeddon would not have been possible without the White House.

Double G called it back in August.  There was never any intention to have a public option.  Obama never backed it with action.  Instead, it was set up for failure from the beginning.

Of all the posts I wrote this year, the one that produced the most vociferious email backlash -- easily -- was this one from August, which examined substantial evidence showing that, contrary to Obama's occasional public statements in support of a public option, the White House clearly intended from the start that the final health care reform bill would contain no such provision and was actively and privately participating in efforts to shape a final bill without it.  From the start, assuaging the health insurance and pharmaceutical industries was a central preoccupation of the White House -- hence the deal negotiated in strict secrecy with Pharma to ban bulk price negotiations and drug reimportation, a blatant violation of both Obama's campaign positions on those issues and his promise to conduct all negotiations out in the open (on C-SPAN).  Indeed, Democrats led the way yesterday in killing drug re-importation, which they endlessly claimed to support back when they couldn't pass it.  The administration wants not only to prevent industry money from funding an anti-health-care-reform campaign, but also wants to ensure that the Democratic Party -- rather than the GOP -- will continue to be the prime recipient of industry largesse.

(More after the jump...)

As was painfully predictable all along, the final bill will not have any form of public option, nor will it include the wildly popular expansion of Medicare coverage.  Obama supporters are eager to depict the White House as nothing more than a helpless victim in all of this -- the President so deeply wanted a more progressive bill but was sadly thwarted in his noble efforts by those inhumane, corrupt Congressional "centrists."  Right.  The evidence was overwhelming from the start that the White House was not only indifferent, but opposed, to the provisions most important to progressives.  The administration is getting the bill which they, more or less, wanted from the start -- the one that is a huge boon to the health insurance and pharmaceutical industry.   And kudos to Russ Feingold for saying so:

Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.), among the most vocal supporters of the public option, said it would be unfair to blame Lieberman for its apparent demise. Feingold said that responsibility ultimately rests with President Barack Obama and he could have insisted on a higher standard for the legislation.
"This bill appears to be legislation that the president wanted in the first place, so I don’t think focusing it on Lieberman really hits the truth," said Feingold. "I think they could have been higher. I certainly think a stronger bill would have been better in every respect."

Let's repeat that:  "This bill appears to be legislation that the president wanted in the first place."  Indeed it does.  There are rational, practical reasons why that might be so.  If you're interested in preserving and expanding political power, then, all other things being equal, it's better to have the pharmaceutical and health insurance industry on your side than opposed to you.  Or perhaps they calculated from the start that this was the best bill they could get.  The wisdom of that rationale can be debated, but depicting Obama as the impotent progressive victim here of recalcitrant, corrupt centrists is really too much to bear.

You can blame Harry Reid, or Lieberman, or any of the Senators, but the reality is as long as we accept the depressingly mediocre bar of  "Democrats who are better than Republicans" as the limit we aspire to, then we get equally mediocre legislation from those Democrats.

Do I like Obama?  Yes.  Did I think he would really pull off a public option bill?  He could have if he wanted to.  And even the bill we have left is probably not going to make it.  Ben Nelson will see to that.

At what point has Obama really done anything to get a good bill passed?  All this time we assumed he was working behind the scenes to get a bill passed, playing 11-dimensional chess. Now we see he was just waiting for the Centrists to inform him who ran the country, and for Obama to meet their demands.

Here endeth the lesson.