"It will be a lot easier to get the American public to adopt any new health-care system if they were a part of the process of crafting it"Obama Policymakers Turn to Campaign Tools
Network of Supporters Tapped on Health-Care IssuesBy Ceci Connolly
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, December 4, 2008; Page A01
Barack Obama's incoming administration has begun to draw on the high-tech organizational tools that helped get him elected to lay the groundwork for an attempt to restructure the U.S. health-care system. Former senator Thomas A.
Daschle, Obama's point person on health care, launched an effort to create political momentum yesterday in a conference call with 1,000 invited supporters culled from 10,000 who had expressed interest in health issues, promising it would be the first of many opportunities for Americans to weigh in.
The health-care mobilization taking shape before Obama even takes office will include online videos, blogs and e-mail alerts as well as traditional public forums. Already, several thousand people have posted comments on health on the Obama transition Web site. "We'll have some exciting news about
town halls, we'll have some outreach efforts in December," Daschle said during the call. And
tomorrow, when he appears at a health-care summit with Sen. Ken Salazar (D-Colo.) in Denver, Daschle said, "we'll be making some announcements there." It is the first attempt by the Obama team to harness its vast and sophisticated grass-roots network to shape public policy. Although the president-elect is a long way from crafting actual legislation, he promised during the campaign to make the twin challenge of controlling health-care costs and expanding coverage a top priority in his first term.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/12/03/AR2008120303829.html?hpid=topnews edit to add - this reminds me of this column by Thomas Frank in the WSJ which I posted yesterday.
Health-Care Reform Could Kill the GOP
Bill Kristol was right to panic.By THOMAS FRANK
-snip-
For decades Republicans have made policy with a higher purpose in mind: to solidify the GOP base or to damage the institutions and movements aligned with the other side. One of their fondest slogans is "Defund the Left," and under that banner they have attacked labor unions and trial lawyers and tried to sever the links between the lobbying industry and the Democratic Party. Consider as well their long-cherished dreams of privatizing Social Security, which would make Wall Street, instead of Washington, the protector of our beloved seniors. Or their larger effort to demonstrate, by means of egregious misrule, that government is incapable of delivering the most basic services.
That these were all disastrous policies made no difference: The goal was to use state power to achieve lasting victory for the ideas of the right.On the other side of the political fence, strategic moves of this kind are fairly rare. Instead, for most of my lifetime, prominent Democratic leaders have been chucking liberalism itself for the sake of immediate tactical gain.
-snip-
Still,
conservatives have always dreaded the day that Democrats discover (or rediscover) that there is a happy political synergy between delivering liberal economic reforms and building the liberal movement. The classic statement of this fear is a famous memo that Bill Kristol wrote in 1993, when he had just started out as a political strategist and the Clinton administration was preparing to propose some version of national health care.
"The plan should not be amended; it should be erased," Mr. Kristol advised the GOP. And not merely because Mr. Clinton's scheme was (in Mr. Kristol's view) bad policy, but because "it will revive the reputation of the party that spends and regulates, the Democrats, as the generous protector of middle-class interests."
Historian Rick Perlstein suggests that
this memo is "the skeleton key to understanding modern American politics" because it opens up a fundamental conservative anxiety: "If the Democrats succeed in redistributing economic power, we're screwed."-snip-
Fourteen years later, we find ourselves at the same point in the political debate, with a Democratic president-elect promising to deliver some variety of health-care reform. And, like a cuckoo emerging from a clock, Mr. Kristol's old refrain is promptly taken up by a new chorus.
"Blocking Obama's Health Plan Is Key to the GOP's Survival," proclaims the headline of a November blog post by Michael F. Cannon, the libertarian Cato Institute's director of Health Policy Studies. His argument, stitched together from other blog posts, is pretty much the same as Mr. Kristol's in 1993.
Any kind of national medical program would be so powerfully attractive to working-class voters that it would shift the tectonic plates of the nation's politics. Therefore, such a program must be stopped.Liberal that I am, I support health-care reform on its merits alone. My liberal blood boils, for example, when I read that half of the personal bankruptcies in this country are brought on, in part, by medical expenses. And my liberal soul is soothed to find that an enormous majority of my fellow citizens agree, in general terms, with my views on this subject.
But it pleases me even more to think that the conservatives' nightmare of permanent defeat might come true simply if Democrats do the right thing. No, health-care reform isn't as strategically diabolical as, say, the K Street Project. It involves only the most straightforward politics: good government stepping in to heal an ancient, festering wound. But if by doing this Barack Obama also happens to nullify decades of conservative propaganda, so much the better for all of us.http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122826686559774533.html
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