Remember when Master Rahm said all the administration had to do was pass "a" health care bill, ANY health care bill?

Have we really forgotten what it is to be hornswoggled into a war without honest discussion of what we hope to achieve and how we plan to achieve it? Well, d'oh! [Click on the general to enlarge.]

"I have a warning for Republicans: Don't underestimate Barack Obama."

-- WaPo website blurb for Chuckie "Chuckles"

Krauthammer's column today, "Obama's next act"

"The president's successes pose a paradox. He is winning on Capitol Hill, but losing with voters."

-- NYT website blurb for Sheryl Gay Stolberg's

"Obama Pushes Agenda, Despite Political Risks"

by Ken

Oh no, I didn't read either of the above pieces. The respective website blurbs were quite enough for me, thank you. I offer them simply as reminders of the gap between the conventional wisdom and the genuine article.

I forget already which progressive sage it was who described Digby's response to the latest round of progressive-bashing planted in Politico) by Master Rahm a senior White House official ("Why Obama loses by winning," by the Village rag's masterhacks, John F. Harris and Jim VandeHei as far better than it deserved. The idea is that these ritual attacks on the Left by the snipers of the right-wing "Center" are just designed to get them attention and make us mad, so we're just playing into their hands by playing our little role.

I get the point, but I think we got in the fix we're in in large part by not answering back, clearly, forcefully, and incessantly. That said, I actually fell into the trap of attempting selective quotation and answering-back, before sweeping it all into the electronic trash. Thank goodness Digby has done her answering-back, and Glenn Greenwald had a fine piece this morning ("Obama-era mysteries"). Let me just quote this line of Digby's: "[T]he central premise [of the Politico piece] seems to be that liberals should be happy that Obama has 'gotten something done' without regard to what that 'something' is."

Suddenly we're back to the worst uglinesses of the bogus health care "reform" struggle. (Why "bogus"? Because the one thing that was never allowed anywhere near the negotiating table was actual reform of our health care system, which would have been too threatening to too-powerful financial interests.) Or, in other words, back to where we always were in the Obama administration.

The Politico hacks make much of political "reality," but really, if this is as much as they know about reality, they really ought to find another line of work than Village idiocy. On health care, for example, the White House "Centrists" never spent a second contemplating what legitimate reforms might be achievable. To begin with, it eventually became clear that they operated within the unshakable ground rule that nothing could be done that would alienate the megacorporations that channel so much cash to politicians. And beyond that, they considered only the politics of the outcome, and there's hardly any way that their consideration of the politics could have been stupider or more self-defeating.

What I'm remembering particularly is the strategy that was universally attributed to Master Rahm, whereby all that mattered was passing a bill, any kind of bill (within the built-in "protect the big players" limits already noted). True, thanks to the persistence of a lot of hard-working people, the final bill might have been worse. Indeed, if the Master had had his way, it would have been worse. I've heard no pushback to the reports that he was willing, if not actually eager, to throw out anything that might have contributed to the public but not to his idea of his political good.

If you have actual policy goals, this is maybe not so good. When you consider how much mindless, unconsidered giving away this White House has done, in the name of "compromise" with people who wouldn't support it at any time for any reason, you don't know whether to laugh or cry. Which is what I had in mind tossing that blurb for "Chuckles" Krauthammer's column. We don't have to read it to know that he hasn't come to praise the president.

All those people are interested in is bashing him. Which is why, once the "just say no" strategy became clear, there should have been no thought of caring a whit what those people think. Instead, the president and a league of message-capable surrogates should have been out there making a case -- to the real middle of the country (not to be confused with the "Centrists"), people who might be brought to understand how they've been hornswoggled and battered by the Right.

Of course you can't do that if you have hornswoggling and battering of your own up your sleeve. Which bring us back to our health care "reform" example, we can't glide so easily over the open question of what the Obama administration actually wanted. On this subject Glenn Greenwald provided us a timely reminder yesterday in writing ("The revolving door spins faster on healthcare reform") about the appalling appointment of insurance industry lobbyist Liz Fowler, who has moonlighted in government service , most notably as Sen. Max Baucus's go-to health care "expert," in which capacity she wrote major portions of the health care "reform" bill before returning to her home industry, to the position in HHS that will make her effectively the government's administrator of the newfangled system she more than anyone concocted.

"Perhaps," Glenn wrote, "Russ Feingold was right when he said that the public-option-less, drug-importation-free, captive-customer-to-private-insurers bill which Fowler helped to engineer 'appears to be legislation that the president wanted in the first place.'" Perhaps indeed.

Even when the Politico hacks are right, they miss the point, as when they point out that while candidate Obama did say he was going to get us out of Iraq (and say, how's that going?), he also said he believed Afghanistan was a good war. But for cripes' sake, does that really mean that the subject of what we're doing and what we plan to do in Afghanistan is permanently closed? In the name of all that's holy, have we really forgotten what it is to be hornswoggled into a war-without-end without any fair discussion of what we hope to achieve and how we plan to achieve it?

Well, d'oh! Was there ever any real question on the point? I mean, like, do we really need Digby to remind us the measure of the value of doing stuff has to include consideration of which stuff got done? (Answer: Apparently we do.)

I made reference the other day, writing about the inevitable loss-of-memory of all those still-unwritten reports in the works on the Gulf oil disaster to a Right-Wing Memory Hole. ("Even though the water-carrying energy-industry shills of the Right don't like being caught too flagrantly licking their masters' boots, the stooges are hard at work sanitizing the history of this disaster so as to grease its passage down the legendary and indispensable Right-Wing Memory Hole.") The truth is that the institutional devotion of Villagers everywhere to maintaining the status quo makes that Memory Hole perhaps the most thoroughgoingly bipartisan institution in current political use.

Oh, there are a bunch of things those folks know how to remember. (If you send Karl Rove a SASE, perhaps he'll send you his list.) But without the strategic ability to forget, our political apparatus would grind to a halt. I mean a haltier halt than it's at.


P.S.: IAN WELSH DOESN'T WANT OBAMA DOING ANYTHING HE AGREES WITH -- HE'LL "SCREW IT UP AND DISCREDIT IT"

"All Obama’s half assed 'left wing' policies have done is discredit the left for another generation."

-- Ian Welsh, in a blogpost yesterday,

"Blaming the blogosphere for Democratic failures"

Ian Welsh had a great take on the Politico nonsense. He started by quoting Mother Jones's Kevin Drum:

Here’s the good news: this record of progressive accomplishment officially makes Obama the most successful domestic Democratic president of the last 40 years. And here’s the bad news: this shoddy collection of centrist, watered down, corporatist sellout legislation was all it took to make Obama the most successful domestic Democratic president of the last 40 years. Take your pick.

Then he wrote:

Here’s the thing. What matters is whether policy works. It does not matter if what Obama did was more left wing than anything that’s been done in a while (though in absolute terms I would argue it mostly wasn’t left wing; the health care plan, for example, was essentially a Republican plan from the 90s), what matters is if it was left wing enough (big enough stimulus, smart enough health care plan) to improve people’s lives enough that they noticed.

It wasn’t, and that’s all that matters.Policies such as the stimulus were not done well enough, and everyone from Nobel prize winners with good predictive records like Stiglitz and Krugman, down to nobodies like me, predicted it at the time. The President hired the wrong people to give him advice, didn’t even do as much as many of them wanted, and now we all pay the price.

Sometimes half doesn’t work. Half-assed rarely does. All Obama’s half assed “left wing” policies have done is discredit the left for another generation. Combined with the ability of the media, Republicans and hysterical Tea Baggers unable to use a dictionary to define him as a “socialist” this means that Obama’s policies are seen as left wing, and left wing policies are seen to have failed.

I don’t want Obama doing anything I agree with, because he will screw it up and discredit it. In this respect he is like Bush. He is poison because he is incompetent at policy.

As for the Politico piece itself, Ian suggested that it "says more about [the authors] and the White House than it does about the left wing blogosphere they try to blame for Democrats' own failures."

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