Tom Tomorrow wonders if the president, that multidimensionsal-chess genius, is really just a lousy poker player -- I say there's more to it

If we can't get single-payer . . .
We'll settle for the public option. Um, Mr. President, didn't you support that in your campaign?

[Don't forget to click on it to enlarge.]

by Ken

We have it from the president's own mouth that everything there is to be said about health care has been said. (Well, that's a joke -- to me, if not to the president, as I tried to explain last night. It strikes me that actually hardly any of the most important things have been said, at least not as part of the official "discussion.") So why am I on the subject a second day in a row? Let's just say I want to get the rest of my scraps on the record, so I can go on to worrying about important stuff like the state of Sandra Bullock's marriage.

More than anything I just want to embarrass myself by asking the most naive question that can be asked about this whole debacle of a "health care debate" -- a protracted screech-fest that has touched on many mostly subjects, rarely including "health":

What if all that money had been spent on, you know, health care?

FIRST, A WORD TO OUR FRIEND,

THE GREAT TOM TOMORROW

No, Tom, as far as I know, candidate Obama never did say he would support a public option. Oh, he may have intimated now and then, including after he took office, that yes, a public option is certainly an idea. And if for some improbable reason the insurance companies had been prepared to go along with it, I'll bet he would have been happy to include it in "his" plan, when he finally got around to having one.

MAYBE THERE'S A SIMPLE REASON WHY

THE PRESIDENT DIDN'T NEED TO HAVE A PLAN

The thing that originally put me off Obama in the presidential sweepstakes was that notion that he could solve problems by bringing all the parties together to negotiate, and the example was that the insurance and drug companies would be at the table for any health care reforms. It seemed to me hopelessly naive to imagine that the health care industries were going to willingly go along with any of the reforms needed to truly remake the U.S. health care system.

Now, finally, I understand that he wasn't being naive about what concessions they were prepared to make. His idea, as I now understand it, was that when you gather all the interested parties, what you come away with is whatever they agree to. The unstated corollary was that some parties' agreement would count for more than others. It turns out that the insurance and drug companies aren't expected to give up much of anything. I'm not sure why; could it just be because they're the richest and most powerful people at the imaginary table? Whereas consumers of health care are supposed to be satisfied with whatever deal is worked out.

Well, this seems to be the "postpartisan" world that the president had, and has, in mind. It's really not so different from the view attributed to his sidekick, Master Rahm Emanuel, that from the political standpoint all he needed to do was get a health care bill, any bill, passed. The only difference, I'm suggesting, is that Master Rahm means it cynically, while his boss means sincerely that a compromise is good.

(He also seems to believe that who does the compromising is in good part preordained. So where no fundamental concessions were to be expected from Big Pharma and Insurance, it hardly required a second thought to throw women's reproductive rights under the bus. There's something about this philosophy of governance I'm just not getting.)

AFTER A NIGHT OFF, WE GET BACK

TO FOLLOWING THE MONEY

We had a lot of money talk last night, mostly in terms of the stakes for the big-money players, which in my present understanding I believe the president and most of the Dem negotiators (you know, specimens like Max Baucus) were prepared to accept as sacrosanct. But I didn't particularly follow my own prescription of following the money, by which I mean the gazillions of dollars that have been dumped into the campaign against meaningful health care reform (the sort of thing, once again, that Howard Dean has been talking about, which I guess is why he never became part of the official discussion either.)

Of course Howie has been on the job of tracking the bribes paid by the big-money players to members of Congress, but that's only a part of the total expenditure in this high-pressure propaganda campaign. In the new (April 8) New York Review of Books, Michael Tomasky has a piece called "The Money Fighting Health Care Reform" (the cover line is "The Big Money vs. Health Reform"), in which he makes a heroic effort to quantify the numbers.

I should note that Michael has a different understanding from my new one of what exactly the president's agenda has been in this fight. He writes, for example, that the Sunlight Foundation's Paul Blumenthal (in "The Legacy of Billy Tauzin: The White House-PhRMA Deal") "documents how, step by step, PhRMA won on every point in negotiations with White House officials and with Max Baucus," when as I see it there was no winning or losing from the standpoint of the president -- or of Baucus. They were negotiating to see what kind of deal could be agreed on. Whatever they came up with was by definition a "win."

But Michael certainly understands the role money has come to play in our governance. He concludes his piece:

Whether it passes or not, the institutional pressures of big money have effectively and quietly deformed central parts of the bill and continue to loom over any attempt by Congress to write and pass major domestic legislation. Stronger financial regulation is now being resisted daily by Wall Street lobbies. It's not a coincidence that there have been fewer and fewer pieces of large-scale economic and social legislation since big money has increasingly dominated politics from the 1980s on. The question that remains open is whether there is any effective way of revealing what is being bought and sold in Congress.

Let's face it, these companies aren't spending the kind of money they're spending out of the goodness of their hearts, or to protect a philosophical principle, or because they've taken on the patriotic role of providing that amount of economic stimulus. They're spending it because they see it as a prudent investment to protect their financial interests. And the scope of that investment gives us a clue as to the scale of the ongoing heist they're safeguarding.

And here I am, fantasizing about how much real health care all that money could have bought. Oh well. I gather Sandra Bullock's marriage isn't in much better shape. Oh wait, I see on AOL that her husband has issued an apology and hopes his family can forgive him. Okay.

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