The Dodge Retort

I keep hearing President Obama’s popularity ratings are plummeting. My question is why?

On a macro scale, he’s done just about everything he promised to in the 2007-08 campaign: push healthcare reform and Wall Street regulation; restore America’s diplomatic standing in the world; take a hard line on security; jump start renewable energy; work to close Gitmo and wind down the Iraq War;  rebuild the electrical grid and get economy back on its feet.

credit: Whitehouse.gov

To one degree or another, all of this is happening. As someone who writes about technology, I see billions of federal dollars flowing to utilities in matching grants to rebuild the nation’s electrical grid. Battery makers and electric auto projects are also being backed. Such funding is critical to national security, weaning ourselves off oil imports (does anyone care anymore?) and making the U.S. more competitive.

If he’s made political miscalculations, why would we sour on him when it’s politics and Belthway insider-ism we complain about? Bottom line: President Obama is not doing a good job. He’s doing a great job in incredibly challenging times. But he’s still learning. Did anyone honestly think the country would turn around in a year under a rookie president? Progress has been made and the country is on the right track.

People have short memories about where we were heading under the last president. Check your 401k statements from where they were a year ago. Why would anyone be for allowing insurance companies to drop sick people from their rolls? We’re still losing jobs every month, but the number is far fewer: 598,000 in January, 2009 versus  11,000 in November and 85,000 in December.

The Jan. 19 issue of  Time takes stock in the Obama Presidency  on the eve of his second State of Union speech and it’s quite favorable. More than anything, it faults him for not giving up sooner on courting most Republicans. Besides healthcare reform bogging down, “he’s done a great many other things very well.” Author Joe Klein’s biggest criticism is saved for Republicans, accusing them of “nihilism.”

They [Republicans]  demagogued nonexistent provisions of the [healthcare reform] bill.” Klein writes.

How is that working for us?

Obama told Klein that when he’d go to meet the Republican caucus to get their ideas on the stimulus package, minority leader John Boehner would release statements that the GOP would vote against such a measure before the exchange took place. The Republican leadership acts like petulant children.

A friend told me Obama’s timing is off. When Wall Street was cratering our 401ks a year ago, Obama should have gone after the banks and brokerage firms instead of pursing healthcare reform. That’s a good point. Wall St. was enemy number one, but we voters have short and selective memories.

The far right preaches morality, harps about taxes and if they don’t say so outright hopes President Obama goes down in flames. The Republican strategy is to say “no” until they are back in power. Certainly, they win on being the loudest and most vitriolic. Washington politics are so nasty that “survival is as good as it gets,” Klein writes.

The rest of us – moderate Republicans , Democrats and Independents – want to see the president succeed. And if you’re unsure about President Obama, remember what it was like under the last president.

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If you’ve never heard of Wendall Potter and are interested in healthcare reform, listen to what he has to say about private insurers in an interview at Bill Moyers’ Journal. Potter is the former head PR honcho at CIGNA and resigned last year in a fit of conscience after he visited a free  healthcare “expedition” in Wise County, Virginia in July, 2007.

Wendall Potter Credit: PRwatch.org

Check out the Wise County free healthcare clinic and you’ll immediately understand how desperate people are for affordable healthcare. The expedition, according to Potter, was held on  county fairgrounds in unsanitary and un-private conditions under tents in animal stalls. He comes off as credible and claims he was neither fired nor treated badly by CIGNA. I searched for a rebuttal on CIGNA’s site, but it yielded zero results.

“It was like a lightning bolt hit me,” he said of the so-called “expedition.” Then, he goes to describe how insurers drop people and employers from their rolls when their profits dip and how he participated in an industry-wide campaign to discredit Michael Moore’s movie Sicko extolling the benefits of socialized medicine. Potter says now that the conclusions in the movie are largely correct.

Perhaps most significantly, he talks about the industry’s campaign to plant unjustified fears in the public’s mind about a government health plan. He argues that the insurance companies are simply afraid of competition (that said, they must compete with each other and the government is not under many of the same competitive pressures). Click here for CIGNA’s statement on “Commitment to Healthcare Reform.”

Public plan advocates point to Medicare’s low 2-3 per cent administrative overhead versus up to 30 percent for private insurers. Depending on where you fall in the debate, you can find numbers that argue that private insurers have lower administrative costs. But there’s no denying that private insurers’ profit-based model drives up overhead and impact who’s covered and for what. That’s just common sense.

In most respects, healthcare insurers are just doing what businesses do. But their behavior comes into serious moral conflcit when it involves an inividual’s well-being or life (Moore wants to abolish health insurers and regulate drug companuies like publi utilities. He could well be visionary on those points.) Judge for yourself, but for sure, listen to what Potter has to say.