It's easy to think the debate on health care lies black, blue and bleeding somewhere between Capitol Hill and the scenes of the summer's "Town Meetings." It's easy to think that the President who promised us health care reform has failed us. That he's just a cool wordsmith who's showing signs of not being able to "deliver."
But there are two things we should remember, not just to get the still-popular Obama off the hook, but to understand our own politics. One, it's Congress, not Obama, that has the power under our three-branched system to give us health care reform. Two, Obama's idea about how to run things includes a fourth entity, the people.
Re the first of these points, the so-called liberal media (including this paper, and this column) is partly responsible for the mixup. For eight years, Bush-bashing was so easy that the president's name almost became code for everything that went wrong, even though Congress and its corporate masters (whom the 2008 vote didn't get rid of) were often responsible for the measures that caused the reaction that swept Obama into office.
The result of that bashing that now proves unfortunate is that it reinforced (not intentionally) the idea that the White House is the power that makes all things happen in Washington. Carrying that idea forward, we see Obama as "the decider," waver of the wand. But Obama has to depend on Congress for this reform, and a Democratic majority is far less controllable, less whipped into line, than a Republican majority.
Even more important is this: Obama won the election by using constant contact to keep supporters mobilized for him. Their job was to respond actively, by campaigning for him, by voting for him. It seemed clear then that his orthodox yet novel idea for running the country was to make the people the fourth lever. Now he's taken his case for health care reform to them, and their job is to pressure Congress into passing the reforms they want. Ohio's John Boehner may have been hedging when he said last week that he'd not heard support for a public option, but if he'd gotten the volume of calls he should have gotten given that 57 percent of Ohioans want it, he couldn't have ignored them.
