Rachel Morris in the Guardian gives credit where credit is due. She points out that before the vote on health care reform the US media were tripping over each other trying to get interviews with Rahm Emanuel, all the while missing the real hero in the struggle to pass health care reform legislation.
In the grim weeks after Martha Coakley lost her campaign for Ted Kennedy's US Senate seat, Democrats were the picture of discombobulation. They had passed their healthcare bill in both the House and the Senate, but each chamber still needed to vote on final legislation that merged their separate versions. Now, Democrats had lost their filibuster-proof Senate majority, and the winner of the special election, Republican Scott Brown, was vowing to torpedo the final procedural business required to make the bill law. It was obvious that Obama and his advisers had no Plan B in place for a Coakley loss. No one knew what the White House planned to do next.
The day after Brown's victory, in an interview with ABC News, Obama appeared to signal that he planned to pursue a scaled-back form of health care reform: "To coalesce around those elements in the package that people agree on," as he put it. In the following days, it became clear that this was the strategy being pushed by Emanuel. In fact, from the very beginning, Emanuel had advised the president to pursue more modest goals – doubtless burned by his experience as a White House staffer when the Clinton administration suffered the catastrophic defeat of its healthcare overhaul in the 1990s. Overridden by Obama, Emanuel had been a good soldier and fought aggressively for the president's policy. But now that it had hit the rocks, he advised him to settle for reining in the most egregious insurance company abuses and expanding coverage for low-income families. In the Senate, majority leader Harry Reid also appeared to favour putting healthcare on the backburner.
The one Democratic leader who never publicly wavered from comprehensive reform was Pelosi, who derisively referred to Emanuel's downgraded proposal as "Kiddie Care". Members of her own caucus entreated her to think small, but she made it clear she would opt for nothing less than a sweeping change to the healthcare system. "My biggest fight has been between those who wanted to do something incremental and those who wanted to do something comprehensive," she later told reporters.
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Throughout it all, Pelosi remained adamant that healthcare reform would pass.
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Reporters couldn't seem to get past the fact that she was a mother of five and a grandmother of seven, and perhaps that's why her impressive ability to get things done has garnered a fraction of the ink that Rahm's colourful browbeating has inspired. Now, however, Emanuel the tough guy's cautious, incrementalist remedy for America's healthcare problems has been proven insufficiently bold, and the House speaker's push for go-big-or-go-home reform has won out. Obama, of course, played a pivotal role in this battle, But he couldn't have done it without Pelosi.
Rachel Morris understands our politics better than most of the media in the US, who tend to get stuck in a familiar groove. Then too, the herd instinct runs strong amongst US news persons. It seems to me that they'd rather be with their peers in deciding about which news to cover than "out there" on their own. I wonder if we could have another reporting event like Woodward and Bernstein in the Washington Post during the Watergate scandal.
So who's the tough guy here? Not Rahm, surely. I still don't see a media stampede to interview Pelosi.
When Obama chose Emanuel as his chief of staff, I was quite disappointed. Rahm and Obama are more alike than different in taking the incremental approach, and, for that reason, Obama needed a staffer who would fire him up, someone bold as his chief of staff, not a DLC type. The DLC folks, with their timid approach to almost every issue, inspire in me only slightly less anger than the Blue Dog Democrats, most of whom would fit comfortably in the less extreme wing of the Republican Party.
Thanks to Roger for the link.
