WH hopes a health care victory will offset setbacks on financial regulation and climate change

seafan

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Sun Dec-27-09 03:10 PM
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WH hopes a health care victory will offset setbacks on financial regulation and climate change

Edited on Sun Dec-27-09 03:31 PM by seafan

Man, oh man, are we in deep trouble.

WSJ, December 21, 2009:

WASHINGTON -- Slumping in the polls and struggling to pass climate and financial legislation, President Barack Obama and Democratic leaders are counting on an historic health care victory to buoy their electoral prospects in 2010.

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White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel has been telling Democrats a win on the health issue will reverse the slide in public opinion, just as passage of another controversial proposal, the North American Free Trade Agreement, lifted President Bill Clinton in the polls.

Let's see... Clinton signed NAFTA into law on December 8, 1993, and it took effect January 1, 1994.

You cannot mean, Mr. Emanuel, the "poll lift" that led to Democrats losing control of the House in November of 1994, eleven months after your boss signed NAFTA? That one?

The apparent success by Senate Democrats this weekend in securing the necessary votes to pass a sweeping overhaul of health care before Christmas will offset setbacks on climate change and financial industry regulation, Democrats say.

"The reality, I think, will trump poll numbers in the dead of winter as this debate is going on," White House senior adviser David Axelrod said Sunday on ABC's "This Week."

"We're governing through difficult times," he said on NBC's "Meet the Press." "I think we're going to be in a better place" when the midterm elections arrive.

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These people are living in a dream world of their own making if they are depending on this farce of *historical health care reform* to save their behinds on every other issue that they have accomplished little. I guess they hope people won't notice all of that over the din of the bells and party whistles generously donated by Big Insurance and Big PhRMA.

Last week's Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll not only showed a substantial majority opposed to the plan, but for the first time, it showed a plurality favoring the status quo over passage.

Hello, IS ANYONE HOME??

Mr. Obama is taking heat from the left and the right on health. The president's quest for a 60th vote for the Senate health bill has drawn criticism from liberal Democrats who say the White House has capitulated to conservatives in the party.
"We need the president to stand up for the values our party shares. We must stop letting the tail wag the dog of this debate," Rep. Anthony Weiner (D., N.Y.) said in a post on his Web site.

The Democratic leadership is particularly relying on a health victory as other domestic priorities struggle. The failure of the United Nations climate summit to reach a binding accord could cripple Mr. Obama's chances of securing legislation to limit greenhouse-gas emissions, even after many House Democrats took a politically painful vote for legislation to cap carbon emissions.

Mr. Obama's standing with American voters has fallen more dramatically in his first year than any recent president, in part because he was so popular at the outset, but also because voters perceive he has not accomplished much, said Democratic pollster Peter Hart.

His 47% approval rating is just the start of his problems, pollsters say. The Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll also found the first real evidence that Mr. Obama's personal bond with Americans -- his likability -- has been battered by high unemployment, Democratic infighting and months of bickering over health care, Just 29% of Americans now say they feel "very positive" about the president, down from 36% in October and 47% in February.

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In an interview Friday, Mr. Emanuel expressed little concern for the president's standing with the Democratic base. Mr. Emanuel said the liberal wing of the party is already coming back to the fold.
For instance, liberals such as Mr. Weiner now say they will work to make the bill more like the House version in House-Senate negotiations, rather than implore the Senate to kill the bill.

Mr. Emanuel argued that this generation of liberal political figures won't repeat their predecessors' mistakes in not reaching deals on health care.

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THE 1992 CAMPAIGN; Transcript of 2nd TV Debate Between Bush, Clinton and Perot, October 16, 1992

Q: Yes, I'd like to direct my question to Mr. Perot. What will you do as President to open foreign markets to fair competition from American business, and to stop unfair competition here at home from foreign countries so that we can bring jobs back to the United States.

PEROT: That's right at the top of my agenda. We've shipped millions of jobs overseas and we have a strange situation because we have a process in Washington where after you've served for a while you cash in and become a foreign lobbyist, make $30,000 a month; then take a leave, work on Presidential campaigns, make sure you got good contacts, and then go back out. Now if you just want to get down to brass tacks, the first thing you ought to do is get all these folks who've got these one-way trade agreements that we've negotiated over the years and say, "Fellows, we'll take the same deal we gave you." And they'll gridlock right at that point because, for example, we've got international competitors who simply could not unload their cars off the ships if they had to comply -- you see, if it was a two-way street -- just couldn't do it. We have got to stop sending jobs overseas.

To those of you in the audience who are business people, pretty simple: If you're paying $12, $13, $14 an hour for factory workers and you can move your factory South of the border, pay a dollar an hour for labor, hire young -- let's assume you've been in business for a long time and you've got a mature work force -- pay a dollar an hour for your labor, have no health care -- that's the most expensive single element in making a car -- have no environmental controls, no pollution controls and no retirement, and you don't care about anything but making money, there will be a giant sucking sound going south.

So we -- if the people send me to Washington the first thing I'll do is study that 2,000-page agreement and make sure it's a two-way street. One last part here -- I decided i was dumb and didn't understand it so I called the Who's Who of the folks who've been around it and I said, "Why won't everybody go South?" They say, "It'd be disruptive." I said, "For how long?" I finally got them up from 12 to 15 years. And I said, "well, how does it stop being disruptive?" And that is when their jobs come up from a dollar an hour to six dollars an hour, and ours go down to six dollars an hour, and then it's leveled again. But in the meantime, you've wrecked the country with these kinds of deals. We've got to cut it out.

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Emanuel began his political career as a senior adviser and chief fundraiser for the successful 1989 Chicago mayoral campaign of Richard M. Daley to seize back City Hall from reformists who had challenged the corrupt political machine of this father, Richard J. Daley. Emanuel later became a senior adviser to Bill Clinton at the White House from 1993 to 1998, serving as Assistant to the President for Political Affairs and then Senior Advisor to the President for Policy and Strategy, and was credited with playing a major role in shifting the Clinton administration's foreign and domestic policy agenda to the right. Emanuel was the single most important official involved in pushing through the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the bill ending Aid for Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), and Clinton's draconian crime bill, among other legislation.

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Alternet, "Is Obama Screwing His Base with Rahm Emanuel Selection?" ---November 7, 2008

No, Mr. Emanuel, it appears that the crucial, repeated mistake is your position at the ear of another president.