Bipartisan At Last!

Letting Bush era war criminals get away with murder didn’t do it. Neither did giving away the store to Wall Street or sacrificing the public interest to the insurance, pharmaceutical, for-profit health care and dirty energy industries. Abject servility before the NRA and AIPAC and their ilk didn’t do it either; nor did putting the interests of the constituencies who put him in office – labor especially, but also gays, Latinos and even African-Americans – on the back burner. No matter how far to the right he veered, Barack Obama just couldn’t get the Party of No to say Yes.

Until now! In somber, “pragmatic” tones, Obama made his case for escalating the Afghanistan War and prolonging the occupation indefinitely. [Or until the impending 2012 elections necessitate rethinking. Does anyone believe that, if the troops really do start “transitioning” in July of 2011, it will be for any other reason?] The incoherence of his rationale – build an Afghan state, the better to defeat Al Qaeda in Pakistan – was staggering. [I will leave for a later time or for others to elaborate why, for any conceivable American national interest, the Obama escalation is transparently counter-productive.] But the Republicans could hardly dissent. If they did, it would mean they don’t “support the troops.” It would also require them to break ranks with God and General McChrystal. Clever Obama! In one foul stroke, he won what he most longs for -- a Yes from the GOP.

I don’t expect that many will agree with this diagnosis. How, it will be asked, can bipartisanship explain such an obviously ill-conceived leap into the abyss? But it’s as good an explanation as any of the other contenders: that Obama is the prisoner of his own campaign rhetoric or of hapless Generals eager to get “counterinsurgency” right; that he fears what the Right will do if he “loses” Afghanistan; that the military industrial complex has something on him; that, as the acting steward of the American empire, he can’t be perceived to back away. No doubt, these factors have something to do with Obama’s dreadful decision, as does the inertia of war (we’re there because we’re there), and the willful impotence of what passes for a Left in this country, eager as it has been to cut Obama slack. But I stand by my contention: the main culprit is Obama’s obsessive, reckless bipartisanship.

Over the past year, it has become clear that the guiding principle of Obama’s governing style is to win the hearts and minds, or at least the grudging acceptance, of Republicans and Blue Dogs and Joe Lieberman – in other words, of the most execrable of the execrable. That was the Clintons’ idea too but, for them, it was, like everything else, just opportunism. Obama really believes in it. And, with a little help from his friends Petreus and McChrystal, he figured out how to get what he so desperately wants. Joy to the world, he must be thinking. Until the Party of No figures out how to get back on course, over in the West Wing, it will be a season to be jolly.

Who Does Baucus Think He's Fooling?

“Bipartisanship” fetishism has its limits, as even Barack Obama is beginning to see. After all, it strains the credulity of even the most willfully blind Democrat to think that, for bipartisanship’s sake, one must give up on almost everything – especially if, as in our on-going health care “debate,” the not-very “other” side is determined not to go along any way. Even corporate media pundits are finally coming around to this view!

So who does Max Baucus think he’s fooling with his terrible “health insurance reform” bill? Those who call it an Insurance Company Protection Act are on target, as are those who point out that it is the three million dollars worth of “campaign contributions” from the insurance and pharmaceutical industries that account for Baucus’s unyielding bipartisanship. It’s not that like ordinary Democratic cowards, he’s afraid of Olympia Snowe; it’s that, like the Republicans, he’s owned by the health care profiteers.

Make no mistake: Baucus is not being devilishly clever – coming out with a bill so bad, with such dire consequences for those whom Bill Clinton once called “the great forgotten middle class,” that his fellow Democrats will have no choice but to move forward in a better direction. Baucus is not clever; he’s a bought and paid for hack – as bad as any Democrat can be (and that’s saying a mouthful!).

Opportunities Missed

Republicans are good for one thing: handing opportunities over to Democrats. South Carolina Congressman Joe Wilson did it again last night: before a national audience watching President Obama address a joint session of Congress, he yelled out that Obama was a “liar” – at that point in Obama’s speech when he declared that he was not proposing health insurance for “illegal aliens.” Needless to say, Obama was telling the truth as any minimally informed Congressman should know; needless to say too, in this case as in others (for instance, when he declared that not one cent of federal money would go to pay for abortions), Obama’s “bipartisan” concessions are anything but estimable. Judging by the reaction of the corporate media, Wilson’s “incivility” was a boon to the Democrats; much as was the town hall blathering of “birthers” and “deathers” and “tenthers” and other unhinged morons, spurred on by Fox News and even less savory instruments of the GOP’s propaganda machine.

Democrats are good for one thing too: doing as little for the public good as they can with the opportunities that fall their way. Had Obama just said, from the beginning, that health care ought to be a right, not a commodity, and therefore that no one who doesn’t contribute to health care should profit from it, we’d now be on the point of joining the rest of the world in this regard. I’ve suggested before, and I continue to believe, that corporate opposition to a single-payer system would be no more intense than the opposition has been to Obama’s vague and not very coherent “guidelines” for reform, notwithstanding how much Obama’s reforms will do to “grow” the client base for private insurers, even if a “public option” survives the “sausage-making” now underway. But, following the lead of the Clintons before him and for reasons that are all too plain, Obama, along with the Pelosiite leadership of the House and Senate, ruled single-payer out of bounds from the get go.

In last night’s speech, Obama didn’t fold on the public option – not yet. He only said that it is one of several means to the end of providing affordable and universal (well, not quite universal) coverage. Thus he suggested that “the left” was wrong to fetishize the idea or, as the pundits say, “to draw a line in the sand” at that point. This was a skillful way to evade what is really going on in the “debate.” The right fears, and the (not-very) “left” hopes that a public option will be a Trojan Horse leading to a single-payer system. These fears and hopes are well-founded. If a public option is robust enough to be worth having, it will be attractive to almost everyone who is not a heavy investor in the insurance industry or a dogmatic free-marketeer. As John Edwards made clear in the early Democratic debates, a public option can be a way to back into the obvious solution. This is the hope and the fear that Obama, along with nearly everyone else in the political class and the corporate media, is intent on obfuscating.

It was interesting to see how Obama dealt with the obvious superiority of single-payer proposals last night. First, in good “centrist” fashion, he threw a sop to both the “left” and the “right” – saying that there are good arguments in favor of both single-payer systems and for relying on unregulated markets; in other words, good arguments in favor of the obvious solution but also in favor of the empirically and theoretically unsustainable convictions of free-marketeers. But then he said that, given how much of the American economy involves health care, it would be impractical to do anything other than build on and improve upon the system in place. This is a contention Obama makes whenever the issue arises. What he never does is support his claim with compelling arguments. The reason why is plain – a transition to a single-payer system is no more impractical than what Obama is proposing. What it is is detrimental to the interests of the health care profiteers (in the insurance, pharmaceutical and for-profit health care industries) who own the Republican Party outright and the Democratic Party nearly as completely.

I’m no expert, but I do know that there is nothing especially disruptive about people transitioning from private insurance to Medicare when they reach the age of 65. Here then, off the top of my head, is a way to make single-payer practical: beef up Medicare and then progressively lower the age for joining the system (going down from 65 to 55 would be a reasonable start); while making SCHIP an entitlement for all children (progressively raising the age for admissibility). Add to that the insurance reforms Obama is proposing for those in the middle and we would indeed be well on our way to where the rest of the developed world has been for more than half a century. If there really are fiscal concerns about going this route, then the steps up and down could be calibrated to take them into account. Meanwhile, one might think about the fiscal benefits of ending the hyper-costly Bush-Obama wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and rescinding the deficit-swelling tax cuts Republicans, along with many Democrats, gave to the super-rich in the early days of the Cheney-Bush administration.

No doubt, there are other, better ways, to get from here to there. Obama claimed last night that he was interested in hearing about “good ideas” and that his door is always open. At that point, it would have been salutary, though uncivil, for someone to yell out that he is a “liar.” For he is surely not interested in the thinking of the victims of the system in place or in hearing about ideas, no matter how compelling, that those who commodify health care oppose. If his door is open to anyone, it is to the bought and paid for legislators he is trying to woo and to the lobbyists of the interests they represent. For everyone outside this “bipartisan” consensus, the doors of power are, as always, firmly shut.

Who's Afraid of Olympia Snowe?

As I have noted countless times, the ruling class types who were the pillars of the Republican Party of old have effectively ceded control of the Grand Old Party to the useful idiots Ronald Reagan and others enlisted into their ranks. Thus the GOP today is morally and intellectually bankrupt. Worse still, it is in league with the Dark Side – especially now, with the election of an African-American President. To their everlasting shame, Republicans have aided and abetted those who make it their business to cultivate that seedbed of resentment which, it seems, is always with us -- reawakening what Richard Hofstatdter long ago called “the paranoid style” in American politics. Nevertheless,, one must admire the Republicans for their obduracy, if only because it works. The GOP is well on its way towards blocking the timid reform measures advanced by its electoral rival, the Democratic Party -- or, as I prefer to call it, the POP, the Party of Pusillanimity.

If only the good and reasonable legislators who comprise “the democratic wing of the Democratic Party” would learn a trick or two from their vile and ludicrous competitors! This may be happening. At long last, as the Obama administration careens rightward on health insurance reform, there is hope that the not very progressive Progressive Caucus is finally developing a backbone. It is far from clear, though, whether, in the end, progressive legislators will indeed resist Obama’s call to be “good soldiers” – by conceding just about everything. They could still cave – winning yet another one for the Gipper (figuratively speaking, of course).

The conventional wisdom has it that if nothing that can be called “health care reform” passes, it will sink the Obama administration. This is nonsense. The Obama administration is sinking itself thanks to its bipartisanship, and unless it is forced to hold its ground, at least on this central theme of its first year, it will only sink deeper into the muck.

Progressive legislators should remind themselves that, so far, Obama has effectively betrayed or at least neglected every progressive constituency that supported him; that, contrary to what they assumed a few months ago, he is turning out to be a determined practitioner of continual war (today in Iraq and Afghanistan, tomorrow who knows where), a flunky for Wall Street interests, and, in general, just a more intelligent and less inept version of George Bush. Being better than Bush is old news; it is now time, as Obama’s liberal shock troops might say, to “move on.”

Even the remaining Obamamaniacs should appreciate this by now; even they should expend all their efforts in encouraging the Progressive Caucus to remain firm in its resolve to defect if its very minimal demands are not met; especially, if some viable “public option” is not part of the final bill.

Sadly for those who do want to win one for this Gipper, it is a truism that one cannot credibly threaten to defect without being actually willing to do so if need be. The lunatic Right understands this well; it is the source of their power. Progressive Caucus members, along with others in the POP are beginning to understand too. Our task is to keep them on course; to encourage them to hold fast.

Progressive Caucus members should be made to realize that if they do not stop Obama from conceding too much when they have the means to do so, they will have effectively ceded control of the health and welfare of their constituents and the financial solvency of the United States itself (in an era of ever-rising health care costs) to the likes of Olympia Snowe – and perhaps a few other “moderate” Republicans and “conservative” Democrats. Enough already. That hapless characters like the ones Obama is courting should be calling the shots is an insult to the American electorate and, needless to say, a guarantee that Obama’s “victories” will be Pyrrhic victories only. Are the Democrats afraid of Olympia Snowe? Is Barack Obama? By Wednesday night’s joint session of Congress, we’ll probably know.

Now Is the Time!

Even by the standards to which we’ve become accustomed, Republicans have long been, almost without exception, morally and intellectually execrable. They would be nothing more than a joke but for the fact that, with Democratic connivance, their power, as a wing of the reigning duopoly, is effectively institutionalized. Then remarkably, in the past few weeks, they’ve become even worse: rousting America’s Pathetic White Furies into action at the behest of those of their corporate masters who feel most threatened by Obama’s milquetoast health insurance reforms. In short, the Republican Party is fast approaching the point where it can no longer count as a “respectable” Right.

But there is nevertheless something sublime about Republican obstinacy; something “the democratic wing of the Democratic Party” needs urgently to take on board.

If reports this weekend are correct, if Obama and the Democratic leadership in Congress are willing to give up entirely on “the public option” – not just to gut it, but to abandon it altogether – in order to appease right wing (“Blue Dog”) Democrats and to aim for “bipartisan” support; and if it’s true, as it seems to be, that, in order to win over (i.e. neutralize) the pharmaceutical industry’s lobbyists, Obama and Company have agreed to permit the lobbyists’ clients to charge pretty much whatever they like for their wares, as they have been doing all along, then the time is now past due for our ever so “reasonable” democratic Democrats to “just say No” too.

Now is emphatically not the time to win one for the Gipper – or rather for his twenty-first century “liberal” incarnation —but rather to outdo the (barely) respectable Right in obduracy. Democrats may think they need a “victory” at all costs, and many so-called progressives may agree. But if Obama gives up on even the pale semblance of reform he had been defending, then he is headed for a Pyrrhic victory only, and that’s the last thing anybody this side of the Blue Dogs needs.

In 1993, the Clintons set the cause of health insurance reform back a generation. Win or lose, Obama is doing it again.

Because he has been following the Clintons’ lead, this was to be expected. Of course, the conventional (Cokie Roberts) wisdom is that Obama learned from the Clintons’ mistakes. And, indeed, he involved Congress in crafting the legislation, as they did not (until too late), and he didn’t involve his wife, as they did. But these are trivial differences. Obama’s big mistake, like theirs, was to put the “stakeholders’” interests, the interests of the profiteers, above everything else, especially the interests of the stakeholders’ victims. Thus he set out to patch up a system that needs to be radically overhauled. In this way, Obama gave it all away before the “negotiations” even started, just as the Clintons did. Now he’s giving even more away as negotiations proceed.

This is why now is the time for Democrats who have not sunk to the Blue Dog level, to learn from those who have nothing but obduracy to offer. If it comes to that, they should have the courage to scuttle Obama’s “reforms,” not acquiesce in them. If they are clear and emphatic now, though, it might not come to that. In any case, as the public “discussion” bounds rightward, there is no other way.

This is a matter of the utmost urgency. It is becoming as clear as can be that as health insurance reform goes, so goes the rest of what most Obama voters thought they were electing. If there’s to be any chance of stopping the Bush (now Obama!) wars, establishing a “new deal” for organized labor, moving forward in a serious way to avert ecological catastrophes and, for that matter, setting our decrepit capitalist economy on a better course, a little backbone – here and now – is an indispensable first step.

Will Democratic “progressives” in the House and Senate evince a little backbone now, in the face of impending disaster, or will they cave? If the future is like the past, the answer is, alas, all too predictable.

Town Hall Meeetings

There are so many questions Obama should be made to answer. To cite just a few timely ones, he should be forced to explain:

-why he thinks it’s so important not to concede defeat in Afghanistan, even at the cost of squandering American and Afghani lives, depleting the U.S. treasury, and insuring the generation of a fresh supply of terrorists?

-why, along with putting everything else pertaining to organized labor on the backest of back burners, he let the so-called Amigo Summit just concluded pass without even a mention of renegotiating NAFTA (as he promised to do repeatedly during the campaign)?

-and why he’s intent on violating U.S. and international law by not prosecuting everyone, from the top down, involved in torture, rather than, at most, just a handful of underlings who “went beyond” the criminal instructions supplied by functionaries of the Cheney/Bush administration?

But since health care (actually, health insurance) reform is the issue of the moment, how about this: “don’t you think, Mr. President, that a coherent and defensible plan for reform – in other words, a plan for transitioning from the mess we now have to a single-payer system – would have incurred no more opposition than the incoherent and still unformed mishmash you’re now promoting?” Or, equivalently, “don’t you think profiteers in the insurance, pharmacological and for-profit health care industries would (indeed, could) then have done no more than they already are: “lobbying” (essentially bribing) legislators while enlisting unscrupulous Public Relations operatives to spread lies, strike fear and stir up racial animosities within the most benighted sections of the American populace – formerly the useful idiots, now the “base” of the Greater Evil Party?” Or simply, “don’t you think it would be easier to promote a plan that is bold and genuinely “pragmatic,” rather than a plan that, like the one Democrats will put forward, is neither?”

Somebody, please ask him! And if some certifiably delusional idiot on Medicare, railing against government programs, tries to shout you down, don’t be intimidated. If Obama is too stuck on “bipartisanship” to vanquish the Furies, then it’s up to us; and if he’s too stuck on conventional ways of thinking to do what is plainly necessary, then it’s up to us to make him and his bought and paid for Democratic colleagues and co-thinkers do the right thing.

Perils of Bipartisanship: the Dark Side

It may not yet be too late to salvage something decent out of the mess that “health care reform” has become, but time is running short, and the Obama administration and the Democratic leadership in Congress are still up to their old, bipartisan tricks. It is becoming increasingly clear that this bipartisanship of theirs is putting more than just health care reform in peril.

Obama won the presidency in large part because it had become clear to a majority of voters that the Cheney/Bush administration had been flagrantly god awful. It helped too that John McCain was uncharismatic, and that he picked a cartoon character for a running-mate. In those circumstances, all Obama had to do to win large sectors of the electorate over was to position himself towards the center of our rightward-skewed political spectrum. Then, as in judo, he was able to turn his opponents’ attacks into instruments of their own undoing – in a way that even ill-informed, clueless, apolitical “swing voters” could appreciate. But that was then, and this is now. Now it’s legislators, not the people they purport to represent, who must be won over. These are not people who can be persuaded by compelling arguments; they’re too busy paying the piper. The judo maneuvering that won the election for Obama is therefore powerless against them; especially not while health care profiteers are busily stuffing their pockets.

Meanwhile, the Republican Party had long ago turned itself over to its useful idiots, the folks who appeal to the Fox News/right-wing talk radio demographic. While shamelessly playing to this “base” in the 2008 election, John McCain at least had enough decency to reign in the looniest of his supporters when the mood at some of his rallies turned ugly (and, in a not very disguised way, racist). But nowadays, there is no one in charge, and the Republican leadership, such as it is, only wants to obstruct. Being outnumbered in Congress and vastly outnumbered in the general population, they have therefore hit upon the strategy that worked for their German and Italian counterparts in the 1920s and 30s. They have taken to stirring up the furies.

The first inklings of this strategy were the “tea parties,” organized, not very surreptitiously, by Fox News and like-minded (and funded) public relations firms. The tea parties were a joke, but the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor, a Latina for the Supreme Court, nevertheless breathed new life into “the movement.” As per the conventional wisdom, it unleashed the anxieties of the most “left behind” segments of the still (barely) majority white community, and incited the pent up rage of those who feel most in jeopardy. Then came the Gates affair and Obama’s indisputably correct (but nevertheless rescinded) remark that Gates’s arrest and shackling in his own home was “stupid.” After that, it all went viral, as the corporate media – including its “liberal” wing -- desperate for ratings, took the bait, showering derisory publicity on each and every lunacy the far-right can conjure up. But even bad publicity has been good for changing the terms of the debate – even farther to the right.

Thus even the so called “birther movement” has become a factor in our politics. These are the folks who insist that Barack Obama is not a “natural born” citizen, and is therefore not “really” the President. No matter that they have made a cause of a delusion – an expression of a wish in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Their dumb obstreperousness has given them a mainstream hearing.

The crowds turning out to disrupt town hall meetings on health care reform are cut from the same cloth – and are often the same people. They too are impervious to rational argument, oblivious to the facts –and, in this instance especially, militantly opposed to their own best interests. Evidence is mounting too that their “spontaneous” demonstrations are supported financially by public relations operatives in the pay of the insurance industry and other health care profiteers. This is diligently reported and exposed. But, no matter: right-wing obstreperousness, shading off into threats of violence, has helped put even Obama’s milquetoast reform proposals on the defensive.

For this, Obama and his advisors are largely to blame. The problem isn’t just that, wanting to avoid the mistakes the Clintons made a generation ago, they erred in the opposite direction, turning much of the task of fashioning health care legislation over to lobbyists for the so-called stakeholders (the health industry profiteers) and to legislators who do their bidding. That misdeed explains why reform is still a work in progress, and why what will finally emerge becomes worse with each passing day. But it doesn’t, by itself, explain the reemergence of the dark side. That is a consequence of a more far-reaching mistake on Obama’s part -- his dogged insistence on going bipartisan; in other words, in this instance, on taking seriously the views and desires of a morally and intellectually bankrupt, but nevertheless semi-“institutionalized,” political party that has been taken over by its loonies.

No doubt, in the end, Obama will score some kind of “victory” on health-care reform. But, increasingly, it seems that any bill that passes will do little more than mandate a few worthwhile insurance reforms. At this point, it is even still up in the air whether the proposals that Congress will finally enact will include a “public option” worth having, or will permit states to institute worthwhile public options on their own.

In a saner environment, private, not public, options would be in jeopardy. After all, single-payer trumps all the other contenders: it alone makes health care a right, not a commodity; and it alone promises to cut costs without diminishing the quality of care. But despite widespread popular support for making health care a right, and despite significant Congressional support as well, single-payer is, for all practical purposes, “off the table.” Even proponents of Obama’s “public option” now have to fight to keep that pale approximation of a solution alive. Thus, in recent weeks, we have witnessed the evolution of a “debate” between those who want much too little change and those who want no change at all – while proponents of genuine change, “change we can believe in,” are cast into the margins.

This sad state of affairs is a consequence of Obama’s unrequited but determined “bipartisanship,” and of the Democratic Party leadership’s determination to “win” at all costs -- even to the point of sponsoring and supporting Democrats who might as well be Republicans. The result is plain: right-wing, aka “Blue Dog,” Democrats and two or three “moderate” (not flagrantly obdurate) Republicans have become the “swing voters” who hold the fate of health care reform in their bought and paid for hands, while a newly empowered Right drags our political culture ever more deeply into the realm of the irrational and the vicious.

The empowerment of the Republican mob is arguably even more to be regretted than yet again missing an opportunity for bringing America’s health care system into the mid-twentieth century. Sensing victory, the health care profiteers and their functionaries in the media and the public relations industry have taken it upon themselves to do whatever is necessary to keep their income flows intact. The result is already ugly and it is likely, in the weeks ahead, to become even uglier.

It didn’t have to be this way. Had Obama and Company not gone for a vague and indefensible mishmash intended to bring Republicans along, but instead opted from the outset for a coherent and defensible plan – for a single-payer system or some close facsimile -- they would have encountered no more virulent opposition than they have already. Indeed, they would now stand a better chance for success, if only because they’d be promoting a plan that makes sense. But instead they went the “bipartisan” route.

In doing so, they empowered the Fox News/talk radio audience even more than Republican plutocrats had done previously – breathing new life into the most morally and intellectually retrograde currents of our political culture. In this way, Obama’s bipartisanship has put even more than health care reform in peril.

Corruptions

It is looking ever more likely that good old-fashioned corruption will undo the Obama administration’s milquetoast plan to reform the health care system. All that needs to happen is for “the public option” to be compromised away, along with the ability of states to set up single-payer systems on their own. The problem is not graft per se; at least not for the most part. It’s the whacky idea, sustained by obtuse Supreme Courts for more than three decades, that constitutionally protected free speech blocks serious efforts to keep moneyed interests from making “campaign contributions” more or less as they please – in other words, from buying benefits by “investing” in candidates.

In this era of “change,” the health care profiteers this time around have been hedging their bets. Some pharmaceutical interests and some in the for-profit health care industry, along with the AMA, decided to cast their lot with “reform.” Of course, if they start to smell blood, they will probably still jump ship. But they will be winners either way, since liberal Democrats in Congress and the Obama administration have already given them most of what they want. The private insurance industry, however, fears an “existential threat” in the so-called public option. That’s why, for the most part, they’ve cast their lot with the blathering ideologues of the Republican Party and their Democratic counterparts, the “Blue Dogs.” The insurance industry is poised to make the month of August a time for “pre-positioning” right-wing forces in preparation for “Obama’s Waterloo,” as the pathetic but dangerous Jim Demint, Senator from South Carolina, famously put it.

Obama could still prevail. Indeed, if only he’d cease his self-defeating bipartisanship and tamp down his zeal for working out deals, his administration could still deal old-fashioned corruption a blow. Then, unfortunately, the moneyed interests would not exactly lose out. But neither would their nefarious greed unequivocally impede a pale semblance of progress.

Thus old-fashioned corruption may still be dealt a blow. Even in our not very democratic system, this is possible in dire enough straits; and the straits now are dire enough. The question is whether liberal Democrats and the Obama administration will rise to the occasion.

But even if Obama gets his way, real (small-d) democrats will have little to celebrate; for defeating the bought and paid for Blue Dogs and Max Baucuses of the POP, the Party of Pusillanimity, and their even worse colleagues in the Greater Evil Party, will not get to the heart of the corruption that afflicts us. Our democracy is riddled with another, deeper corruption that is much harder to extirpate.

It is worth recalling that, until the end of the eighteenth century, “democracy” was regarded in educated circles in much the way that “anarchy” now is – as a theoretical possibility that no one in his right mind would actually favor. That sense of things changed irreversibly when the American and French Revolutions, and cognate movements elsewhere, turned the demos, the people (in contrast to elites), into actors in the political arena. It took several decades, though, for the perceived challenge democracy posed to property to subside.

The first line of defense was to restrict the franchise to (male) property holders. But that strategy seemed increasingly frail as democratic sentiments continued to rise (in tandem with anti-democratic sentiments of various, but mainly ecclesiastical, colorations). It all came to a head in Britain in the 1840s with the Chartist movement -- where a clear attack on propertied interests took the form of a struggle to extend the franchise to adult males regardless of property qualifications. The Chartist threat was a major factor in the development of the modern party system. It is that system that has made “democracy” safe for capitalism – though at the cost of corrupting the democratic ideal fundamentally, irrespective of how much old-fashioned corruption there may be.

The party system works differently in different places. In parliamentary regimes, there are usually many (bureaucratized and disciplined) political parties that are obliged by circumstances to govern through coalition arrangements. On the one hand, this system does allow most citizens to express themselves politically inasmuch as they are able to find a political party with which to identify. On the other hand, the exigencies of coalition governance generally stifle democratic aspirations; usually because small parties, representing parochial interests at odds with the interests of the majority, must be accommodated. Even so, on the whole, the system does permit a semblance of “rule by the demos.” This is especially true when, as in most countries, old-fashioned corruption is not, as it were, constitutionally protected.

Here, in the Land of the Free, where electoral campaigns are, for the most part, privately financed, old-fashioned corruption is built into the system. But even if our judicial and legislative branches were more (small-d) democratic, even if the Supreme Court’s rulings on campaign funding were set aside, the pressures that work against real democracy in parliamentary regimes would corrupt democracy in our system too. The difference would be that, as happens now, centrist-tending coalitions would form (implicitly) before elections take place – effectively disenfranchising many, perhaps most, voters. There is always the “danger,” of course, that, in primary elections, “fringe” candidates will prevail by appealing to their respective parties’ “base.” In recent decades, this seems to have been more a problem for Republicans than Democrats. Being afraid to take their own side, “liberal” voters in Democratic primaries have tended to vote like pundits – gravitating towards “the center,” as conventional wisdom defines it (not because that is where they are in their aspirations, but because that is how they think Democrats can win). John Kerry’s victory in the 2004 Democratic primaries exemplified this phenomenon perspicuously. That a more progressive candidate than Obama did not prevail in the 2008 primaries was, at least in part, a consequence of similar ratiocinations on the part of Democratic voters.

As I’ve pointed out in countless entries, Obama ran to the center-right in the primaries and has been moving rightward ever since. Thus, no matter how much Rahm Emanuel goes on about not letting a good crisis go to waste, that’s exactly what the Obama administration has done – with health care reform and nearly everything else.

With health care, the time was right: we could have replaced the increasingly untenable status quo with a single-payer system. But, for that, instead of taking the obvious solution “off the table,” Pelosi-style, Obama would have had to defend it forthrightly, spending his political capital as freely as he doles out real capital to our real rulers on Wall Street. And because Republicans could never be brought on board, he would have had to drop the whole bipartisan effort that has blighted his presidency to date. That was not to be, because that would constitute a real challenge to the underlying corruption of the regime; something Obama has not shown the least inclination to take on. Single-payer is superior in every way to the mishmash Obama is promoting, but that is an irrelevant, if inconvenient, fact. For Obama and the rest of the Party of Pusillanimity, the POP, it is more important to pay obeisance to the structural corruption that is our party system by supporting the GOP-POP duopoly than to do the right thing.

Obama’s bipartisanship in this matter at least, is therefore not just an ill-conceived strategy. It is that, of course, but it also represents a (re)affirmation of the system in place. The catastrophes Cheney and Bush bequeathed Obama made that system vulnerable in ways it has not been for decades. Had there been a will, there would have emerged a way if not to change it fundamentally, at least to reform it structurally. But this was not to be. In consequence, even the modest reforms Obama envisions may not be either.

Of course, no Democrat could lead an assault on our two-party system itself. But there was a chance fundamentally to modify the structural corruption of democracy that our two-party system institutionalizes. Then the health care crisis could be made better. Then too the rest of an agenda suited for our time could fall in place.

This would be a victory for (small-d) democracy as well. For then those of us not stuck in the dead center, as defined by the arbiters of conventional wisdom, might actually be genuinely enfranchised for the first time. We might then have something not just to vote against, but instead to vote for. It isn’t happening though. Thus, sadly but predictably, we can only conclude that the time is now past due for even the most inveterate Obama boosters to face reality; and to realize that, barring a major change of course, “change we can believe in” is not going to happen on Obama’s watch.

What "Bipartisan" Means

One reason why our “democracy” is so undemocratic, not just by the standards of democratic theory but even in comparison with other existing so-called democracies, is that our electoral competitions are all but monopolized by two semi-institutionalized parties. On the whole, the Democrats are, by far, the lesser evil of the two, partly because they are “nicer” and more competent, but mainly because they depend for votes on constituencies like organized labor that, however feebly, force them into less onerous positions. But the two parties do not really differ in principle; they both represent, first and foremost, the interests of our economic elites. For this, our system of (private) campaign finance, sustained by philosophically indefensible Supreme Court decisions going back more than three decades, is partly to blame. But we should not forget that both parties are ideologically committed to the status quo in any case -- to such a degree that even full public financing would not entirely solve the problem, even if private financing (unequal economic power spilling over into electoral competitions) could somehow be proscribed.

What then does “bipartisanship” mean? Not quite what the word suggests: that two ideologically distinct political formations collaborate on common purposes. Rather, with Democrats and Republicans differing only on degrees of onerousness, it means that the two wings of what is essentially a one party state collaborate for the sake of realizing the interests of the elites they represent.

[Just to be clear, I do not mean that all Democrats are less onerous than all Republicans. There are few, if any, decent Republicans left, but there are plenty of indecent Democrats – they even have their own “Blue Dog Caucus.”]

This, at least, is what “bipartisanship” means to Barack Obama and his fellow “bipartisans.” The problem they’re confronting, though, is that the Republicans are unwilling or unable to go along. They’d rather just obstruct. They’re doing this partly for reasons they consider principled but mainly because they think it will help them eventually in electoral competitions to pander to the Fox News/right wing talk show demographic. This last belief is transparently false, but then, as noted, they are not the brightest bulbs on the tree.

Which fact underscores what the true meaning of “bipartisan” in our time and place is. What the term betokens is an unstinting dedication to suffer fools. For anyone who doubts this, watch, if you can bear it, the Sotomayor hearings about to begin – and wonder why anyone, even Barack Obama with his infinite patience and ill-conceived governing style, would want to take such fools seriously, much less go “bipartisan” with them.

"Bipartisanship" versus Governance

One can never be quite certain that Obama isn’t “faking right” so that he can be in position to do the right thing. But with each passing day, it seems more likely that he isn’t faking: that he’s a go-with-the-flow “centrist” to his core. That’s why he backed down, sort of, on his bipartisan determination to “look to the future” by not prosecuting Bush administration war criminals. But, of course, in this matter, nothing is yet settled -- he could still backslide. For justice to be done, pressure from believers in the rule of law must be relentless. Otherwise, it is sure as can be that Obama will again veer off course.

Sadly, this change of heart is the only inkling of victory to date. In all other matters of consequence, Obama’s reckless bipartisanship is leading to disaster. The title of William Grieder’s latest, “Testicular Politics: Obama is Getting Punked By the Big Dogs of Banking, Does He Have the Balls to Do What’s Right?” gets it right. The same thing is happening in foreign policy. To cite just the most egregious recent example, it is reported that the new extreme right-racist government of Israel wants to take the two state solution off the table unless the U.S. comes around to its view on Iran. This is chutzpah on steroids; in a better possible world, it would embarrass even the likes of Alan Dershowitz. Well, maybe not him, but anyone a shade more decent and less ethno-centric. But Israel could get away with it – if Obama doesn’t have the balls. In this case, in addition to everything else, Obama would have to stand up to his own party in Congress – as recent events concerning Jane Harman, doyenne of the Lesser Evil Party’s right wing, and the ostensibly liberal Nancy Pelosi, aka the Whore of AIPAC, illustrate.

Then, there’s health care. If Republican obstinacy doesn’t derail Obama’s efforts to go bipartisan, he’ll have succeeded not only in marginalizing the single-payer alternative, but in sacrificing universal coverage too. The “partisan” Democratic plan, if true to its word, would at least make public coverage (the same available to federal employees and members of Congress) available to anyone who chooses it. That should put the kaybosh on private insurance in short order. [To keep the Democrats relatively honest on this score, proponents of the Obama plan should be asked at every opportunity just what they think private for-profit insurers contribute to health care. Let Max Baucus and Company wriggle out of that one!] The Clintons set the cause back a generation by not having the balls to take on the private insurers and Big Pharma from the getgo. If Obama is permitted to go bipartisan on this one, that unhappy outcome could happen again.

It all comes down to this: “bipartisanship” or governance. It’s not too late for an enraged citizenry to push Obama and his “team” away from the snare and delusion they are inclined to favor. Obama’s (possible) change of course on prosecuting Bush era criminality proves that. But it won’t be easy – particularly with Congressional Democrats, a few brave souls excepted, dragging everything within their grasp to the right.