Broken record

In less than three days, Obama will be giving another of his make-or-break speeches. Once again, he'll be trying (and, I expect, failing) to redefine the health reform debate that has careened so far out of reason or control. On the Sunday gasbag shows, White House officials prepared the way -- for another round of insipid boilerplate and equivocation. From the NYTimes:

Three days before President Obama is to address a joint session of Congress about overhauling the health care system, administration officials on Sunday continued to characterize a new government program for the nation’s 50 million uninsured as worthwhile but not essential to legislation.

David Axelrod, a White House senior adviser, said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that Mr. Obama “believes the public option is a good tool.” But Mr. Axelrod added: “It shouldn’t define the whole health-care debate.”

Oh no, the public option certainly doesn't define the whole debate. The right-wing whackjobs have taken care of that and now it's insane conspiracy theories about commie-fascist death panels and withholding health care from Republicans that drive the "debate".

The White House press secretary Robert Gibbs, who appeared on ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos,” sidestepped questions on whether Mr. Obama still regarded the so-called public option as a necessity for any bill he would back.

“We’re trying to provide choice and competition for individuals and small business owners,” Mr. Gibbs said when asked if the public option was “essential.”

“The president strongly believes we need to provide choice and competition,” he said. Pressed on whether Mr. Obama would demand that a government insurance program be included in legislation, Mr. Gibbs said that it could be a “valuable component” of any health plan. And asked whether the president would reject a plan that did not include government insurance, Mr. Gibbs responded: “We are not going to prejudge where the process will be.”

[...]

And The Associated Press reported that on a call with prominent liberal House members Friday, Mr. Obama refused to be pinned down.

In his talk-show appearance, Mr. Gibbs said, however, that Mr. Obama will clarify his position in his address to Congress and is considering broadly outlining his own legislation instead of letting Congress set the terms.

It's nauseating. Just fucking make up your mind, already. Stand for something, dammit. I have this nightmare vision of getting to 2012 with a president that has spent the last four years refusing to be "pinned down" about anything of importance.

The endless parroting -- "choice and competition," "competition and choice," blah, blah, blah. What does that mean, exactly? That's right: Nothing. There hasn't been one component of actual reform (versus insignificant tinkering at the edges) that Obama hasn't supported, then "indicated" he'd trade away, and back and forth, yes, no or maybe, ad infinitum.

Are we supposed to cheer that Obama might propose an actual plan? It beggars the imagination that this "clarification" will be any less nebulous than his statements thus far when the latest trial balloon is floated using words like "considering" and "broadly outlining." If he truly wants to "clarify" this clusterfuck, he'll ditch everything and start over by first reading the riot act to the Senate Democrats and then taking a tire iron to their future electoral ambitions.

That won't happen, though. We'll probably get another mealy-mouthed paean to bipartisanship, competition and choice along with heart-felt thanks for the cooperation of the insurance and pharmaceutical industries in fashioning this historic legislation. Feh.

An aside: Not only have I called and emailed the White House, I mailed an ink-and-paper letter to the president in which I promised that he will lose my vote if a fully competitive public option is not passed. Late last month, I received a reply. It's a canned response, brimming with bland boilerplate. The letter includes this line:

There are tough choices to be made, and I will bring businesses and workers, health care providers and patients, and Democrats and Republicans together to create a system that delivers better care and puts the Nation on a much sounder long-term fiscal path.

I am then urged to "learn more about [Obama's] agenda" online. The letter ends with this:

I share the sense of urgency that millions of Americans have voiced. I watched as my ailing mother struggled with stacks of insurance forms in the last moments of her life. This is not who we are as a Nation; together, we will fix it.

Sorry, but Obama's language and tone are so dispassionate, so dry, so brittle, that the merest gust of Teabagger bullshit can easily shatter his narrative -- and that's exactly what's been happening.

Americans are dying because they can't get or afford health insurance. Americans in the hundreds of thousands are facing medical bankruptcy even with insurance. Insurance and pharmaceutical companies are posting the biggest profits on record and they're lavishing millions in salaries and bonuses on their executives while children are denied life-saving treatments. How can these fuckers be winning?

I know Obama is a cool customer. However, if he wants to change the scorched landscape of American health care, he had better get angry --  very angry and very soon. This is a life-and-death debate and Obama's got to man up and fight. Get in touch with your lizard-brain, man.

[Cross-posted at The Broad View.]