The House of Representatives today voted to approve the Senate Health Care Bill and the Reconciliation Bill.
Summoned to success by President Barack Obama, the Democratic-controlled Congress approved historic legislation Sunday night extending health care to tens of millions of uninsured Americans and cracking down on insurance company abuses, a climactic chapter in the century-long quest for near universal coverage.
“This is what change looks like,” Obama said a few moments later in televised remarks that stirred memories of his 2008 campaign promise of “change we can believe in.”
Widely viewed as dead two months ago, the Senate-passed bill cleared the House on a 219-212 vote. Republicans were unanimous in opposition, joined by 34 dissident Democrats.
A second, smaller measure — making changes in the first — cleared the House shortly before midnight and was sent to the Senate, where Democratic leaders said they had the votes necessary to pass it quickly. The vote was 220-211.
This vote is a tribute to Obama’s overarching political strategy: do the math and grind it out. During the Democratic primaries, his team did the math, ignored the ups and downs of the campaign, and focused on get out the vote efforts, and upset Hilary Clinton.
He followed the same strategy during the general election. Focusing on long term efforts and ignoring the ups and downs. And now here with Health Care Reform, he knew he had a Congressional majority, he knew it would be tough. He did the math, focused on a bill that would get a majority, and ground it out. And now he’s won.
And it’s clear that he is now the leader of the Democratic Party, a Party that has been without one for quite some time. This speech before Congress on Saturday is emblematic of that:
I’d say it’s impossible for the Republicans to claim that Obama is ineffectual now. I think he’s going to start to scare them the way Clinton scared them–but Obama doesn’t have the same ethical lapses that Clinton did.
I fully expect the Democrats to maintain control of Congress in the fall, and I honestly believe that this bill will HELP the Democrats in the Fall. I don’t think that Republicans are going to be too thrilled with ads lambasting them for wanting small businesses to pay higher taxes, insurance companies to drop coverage on sick people, and people to not be able to buy affordable, individual insurance.
The AP is reporting that the Obama Administration is set to announce that it will provide loan guarantees for new American nuclear power plants.
The Obama administration’s planned loan guarantee to build the first nuclear power plant in the U.S in almost three decades is part of a broad shift in energy strategy to lessen dependence on foreign oil and reduce the use of other fossil fuels blamed for global warming.
President Barack Obama called for “a new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants” in his Jan. 27 State of the Union speech and followed that by proposing to triple loan guarantees for new nuclear plants. He wants to use nuclear power and other alternative sources of energy in his effort to shift energy policy.
Obama in the coming week will announce the loan guarantee to build the nuclear power plant, an administration official said Friday. The two new Southern Co. reactors to be built in Burke, Ga., are part of a White House energy plan that administration officials hope will draw Republican support.
I am definitely all for this. Nuclear power is a much safer, cleaner source of energy than coal. This is long overdue.
In my opinion, you cannot simultaneously decry President Obama as a terrorist-loving Bolshevik and complain that he isn’t back in Washington from his vacation. That doesn’t make sense. Even by your standards.
This is because, you see, if you really believed that he was a terrorist-loving Bolshevik, you would want him away from his job as much as possible.
Think about it.
Anyways, I hope you have been enjoying your holiday season.
Writing for Politico, John Harris complains that one of Barack Obama’s problems is that he’s just too darn rational.
But his intellectuality has contributed to a growing critique that decisions are detached from rock-bottom principles.
Both Maureen Dowd in The New York Times and Joel Achenbach of The Washington Post have likened him to Star Trek’s Mr. Spock.
The Spock imagery has been especially strong during the extended review Obama has undertaken of Afghanistan policy. He’ll announce the results on Tuesday. The speech’s success will be judged not only on the logic of the presentation but on whether Obama communicates in a more visceral way what progress looks like and why it is worth achieving. No soldier wants to take a bullet in the name of nuance.
First of all, I’m not entirely sure why being intellectual and logical in one’s approach to leadership is a bad thing. We tried eight years of governing by the gut with a President who “believes the same thing Wednesday that he believed on Monday, no matter what happened Tuesday” and it was an unmitigated disaster.
Do I agree with everything Obama’s been doing? Lord no. But complaining that the President is too rational is like complaining that your dinner tastes too good or that your wife is too beautiful. It doesn’t make any sense.
Daniel Larison has an excellent post on the futility of American “condemnation” of Iranian bad acts.
The demand that Obama “speak out” is ultimately a selfish one made by people who want to feel as if they and their government have some control over a situation that is beyond our control. If Obama issued ringing denunciations of Iranian abuses, it would give Western audiences some comfort, and it would offer some false hope to Iranian dissidents who would expect to see Obama shape his policy decisions accordingly, but it would primarily be for our own consumption and it would be a very easy way for Obama to score cheap political points with a political and pundit class steeped in our modern moralistic foreign policy traditions.
“As president, I believe that robotics can inspire young people to pursue science and engineering. And I also want to keep an eye on those robots in case they try anything.”
– President Barack Obama
According to the Obama administration, what were once leading examples of Bush’s lawlessness and contempt for the Constitution — namely, his illegal, warrantless domestic spying programs — are now vital “state secrets” in America’s War on Terror, such that courts are prohibited even from considering whether the Government was engaging in crimes when spying on Americans.
That was the principal authoritarian instrument used by Bush/Cheney to shield itself from judicial accountability, and it is now the instrument used by the Obama DOJ to do the same. Initially, consider this: if Obama’s argument is true — that national security would be severely damaged from any disclosures about the government’s surveillance activities, even when criminal — doesn’t that mean that the Bush administration and its right-wing followers were correct all along when they insisted that The New York Times had damaged American national security by revealing the existence of the illegal NSA program? Isn’t that the logical conclusion from Obama’s claim that no court can adjudicate the legality of the program without making us Unsafe?
Obama’s favorability-unfavorability rating in the South is 28-67, while it is 68-23 in the rest of the country.
Despite the strides taken in the past couple of decades towards globalization and community building on the Internet, the fact remains that geography and the culture that you live in are pretty persistent and hard to change. The place you live in has a big influence over your thinking and behavior, whether you notice it or not.
Reading Andrew Sullivan, I came across this fascinating quote regarding American exceptionalism in this disjointed column by Ben Shapiro:
So yes, I hate Obama’s America. Because Obama’s America isn’t America — it’s the European view of America, implemented from high office. Opposing the total redefinition of America isn’t anti-American; it’s patriotic. And opposing those, like Obama, who push for that drastic redefinition, isn’t “hating America” — it’s fighting in favor of the America that ended slavery, built the greatest economic empire in world history and liberated tens of millions around the globe. If that isn’t patriotic, I don’t know what is.
Anyone who has ever bothered to pick up a history book knows that it wasn’t America that ended slavery. Indeed, the United States was one of the last countries in the world to abolish slavery–coming ahead of only Brazil of major Western powers involved in the trade. Great Britain, on the other hand, was the first major power to abolish slavery and the slave trade–58 years before it was abolished in the United States. Indeed, there was a division within the Royal Navy designed specifically to combat the slave trade.
Now as for Shapiro’s second claim, it’s hard to say whether the United States “built the greatest economic empire in world history” because I don’t know what that means. It’s an undefined, vague, nebulous term that’s resistant to analysis and arguably self-contradictory.
Finally, Shapiro claims that the United States “liberated tens of millions around the globe.” Now, again, this isn’t exactly defined but I’m going to assume that he’s referring to World War II. However, despite what you might see in the movies, it is not true that the United States single-handedly defeated Nazi Germany. As it turns out, we had allies in that fight. Including the Soviet Union, which alone lost millions of soldiers in the War. And, again, Great Britain, who’s ability to hold off the Germans until 1942 assured that there was still a Western Front. The French and Polish Resistance contributed mightily to the cause. The Norwegians took out the Germans’ Heavy water facility and probably prevented Hitler from getting the bomb. The Australians assisted in both the European and Pacific fronts. The Canadians were the only forces who achieved all of their objectives on D-Day.
The list goes on.
Now, don’t get me wrong–I do believe that America is an exceptional nation, in many respects. I revere the Founding Fathers, the Constitution, our enduring institutions. I am proud of a history that, marred as it is with horror (as all nations’ histories are marred), is still guided by a noble, essential decency.
But I cannot and will not support some blind jingoism that refuses to admit that the United States has ever done the wrong thing and refuses to see the wonders in the history of other cultures. And I refuse to subscribe to some egotistic fantasy that I am somehow better than my fellow humans because I was born inside some arbitrary lines on a map.
This post by Daniel Larison comparing Obama’s and Bush’s foreign policies is close to dead on:
What conservative critics ignore and what Andrew only touches on towards the end is that the Bush administration oversaw setback after failure after defeat for American influence and power. Iran has become a far more influential regional power thanks to the folly of Bush’s invasion of Iraq, democracy fetishists helped to strengthen the hold of Hamas in Gaza to the detriment of Palestinians and Israelis, and Russophobes helped to encourage Saakashvili’s recklessness with talk of NATO membershop and provoked Russian ire with the recognition of Kosovo that led to the de facto permanent partition of an American ally. Hawks have routinely unleashed forces they do not understand, cannot control and are unwilling to contain, and they still have the gall to shout “Appeasement!” when someone else tries to repair some small measure of the damage they have done. Compared to this partial list of Bush’s major failures, Obama has done reasonably well simply by not persisting in some of his predecessor’s errors, but it is far too early to speak of success or payoff and it is a mistake to measure Obama’s success in the way that his supporters wish to do.
