Time for Obama to Stand Tall (WP)

[jeffbr]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/09/08/AR2009090803244.html?hpid=topnews

Time for Obama to Stand Tall
By Steven Pearlstein
Wednesday, September 9, 2009

In his speech to Congress on Wednesday night, President Obama will try to regain control over a national conversation on health care that has been hijacked by ranters and ravers of all stripes and members of Congress who don't know their own minds and cower before their own constituents.

It's disappointing that Obama must also overcome the timidity of some of his own political advisers who seem to have succumbed to the dreaded Washington disease, whose symptoms are a fixation on polls and an unnatural gullibility for conventional wisdom. It is one thing to accommodate political reality but quite another to sacrifice first principles, embrace bad policy in the name of compromise and capitulate to political thuggery.

At the memorial service for Ted Kennedy in Boston last month, Vice President Biden remarked that Kennedy's strength as a leader was that he never acted in a small or petty way, so "people didn't want to look small in front of him -- even the people who were small." Obama's task Wednesday is to demonstrate the same sort of leadership, not only by laying down the moral and economic imperative of health-care reform but by coming clean on some of the tradeoffs that will be necessary in achieving it.

What makes reform such a difficult puzzle is that the fundamental policy goals of universal coverage and cost containment are inconsistent with the political instincts to assure Americans who already have health insurance that they will be able to keep everything they already have, to assure that nobody will get a tax or cost increase and to assure those in the health-care industry that there will be no reduction in their income. Obama's mistake so far is not that he left it to Congress to hammer out the details of competing reform plans, but that he failed to give Congress political cover by helping people understand that there can be no gain from reform without at least some fairly apportioned pain.

Deals negotiated with doctors, hospitals, health insurers and drug companies represented a good running start on the path of shared sacrifice, but the president failed to follow through with other key players. From a business community that wants to preserve the employer-based system, he failed to get a commitment that all employers should participate. He kowtowed to organized labor by backing away from a reasonable cap on the favorable tax treatment of health benefits. And he folded like a cheap suit when right-wing attack dogs scared the elderly with talk of euthanasia and death panels rather than aggressively defending the logic of living wills and evidence-based medicine.

[Davis_X_Machina]

1. Op-Ed piece, not the WP speaking as the WP.

The paper proper would only ask Obama to stand tall if it made throwing things at him easier.

[joeycola]

2. yes, past time to do so.