Saturday, November 22, 2008

Americans demand change; health care top priority

Pundits love centrism, but voters want change

Tuning out the brain-dead megaphone

Pundits claim we're a center-right nation -- but polls show voters elected Obama to enact his progressive agenda.

Full article by David Sirota at Salon here.

For weeks, your television, newspaper and radio have been telling you that America is a "center-right nation" that elected Barack Obama to crush his fellow "socialist" hippies, discard the agenda he campaigned on, and meet the policy demands of electorally humiliated Republicans.

This is the usual post-election nonsense from the Braindead Megaphone, as author George Saunders famously calls our political and media noise machine. When George W. Bush wins by 3 million votes, the megaphone blares announcements about a conservative mandate that Democrats must respect. When Obama wins by twice as much, the same megaphone roars about Democrats having no mandate to do anything other than appease conservatives. . . .

Public opinion surveys show that most Obama voters knew the Illinois senator was a progressive when they cast their ballots — and that those votes for him weren't just anti-Bush protests; they were ideological. According to a post-election poll by my colleagues at the Campaign for America's Future, 70 percent of Americans say they want conservatives to help this progressive president enact his decidedly progressive agenda. . . .

Judging from his advertisements, Obama identified a no-more-important priority than guaranteeing healthcare for all citizens. The Campaign Media Analysis Group reported that he devoted more than two-thirds of his total television budget to ads that included healthcare themes. In mid-October 2008, a Pew Poll found 77 percent of Americans said healthcare would be a decisive concern in their presidential vote.

The moral case for universal health care is obvious. In the world’s richest country -- in a country that builds lavish sports stadiums and showers Wall Street with trillion-dollar bailouts -- 18,000 people die each year because they lack health insurance. We permit this annual massacre while our wasteful system exacerbates our debt and saps our economic competitiveness by forcing us to spend more money per capita on healthcare than any other nation. . . .

Overcoming inertia on such a thorny issue requires budget pressure -- which Obama definitely faces. While some claim the deficit should preclude bold healthcare legislation, it’s the other way around. The Congressional Budget Office says America’s fiscal gap is “driven primarily by rising healthcare costs,” meaning a fix is an imperative.

"People ask whether [Obama] has the fiscal breathing room to push health-care reform," economist Jared Bernstein told the Washington Post. "He doesn't have the fiscal breathing room not to do health-care reform." . . .

Fifteen years ago, Republican strategist William Kristol warned that the Clinton administration's universal healthcare proposals represented "a serious political threat to the Republican Party" because, if passed, they "will revive the reputation" of Democrats as "the generous protector of middle-class interests." . . .

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