The Blog of Larry Tagg

First, a note of perspective: If Obama can turn the economy around before the next election, his presidency will prosper despite any failures at health care reform. However, if the economy is still a source of anguish in three years, then Obama’s ability to deliver health care reform may be a deciding issue in 2012.

Obama was masterful in the Portsmouth Town Hall meeting on health care, but his eloquence, charm, and ability was in the service of very little. His patter was infinitely better expressed, but not significantly different than Steny Hoyer’s doomed speech at his own self-inflicted wound of a townhall meeting a couple of days before, in upstate New York.

That is, Obama and Hoyer both depended on platitudes to fill out the program. Both asked for support—for a bill neither one could elucidate. That is because the health care reform bill itself is such a mish-mash nobody is sure what’s really in it. The main problem for health care reform is that Obama has declined to anger the intrenched Washington financial lobby by actually proposing anything himself. Instead, he left health care reform entirely to Congress, and now is getting exactly what anybody who leaves things entirely to Congress gets.

It would be better to start over.

Next time, President Obama should take the time to prepare his own health care reform plan. Then he should campaign mightily for that carefully considered plan, knowing, going in, that if he wants a revolution in health care that benefits average Americans, he is going to anger the huge financial interests that are benefitting from the status quo. In arguing for such a revolution, he has a better chance of providing the kind of leadership America needs.

After all, Obama’s President-of-choice Abraham Lincoln gave his own worst speeches when he had to spout high-sounding nothings, as on his February 1861 train journey to his First Inaugural. It was only when he had to argue for something that all the ligaments of Lincoln’s brilliance showed. He wasn’t a lawyer for nothing. And Lincoln was always prepared to give away everything except the vital nub of an argument, if it served to insure the final victory of the measure. Obama, I have a hunch, could be a similarly persuasive President. But only if he’s arguing for something he believes in.

In so doing, he would move beyond the formless “Hope” and “Change” watchwords of his campaign, toward something with substance. In so doing, he would speak to a huge, crucial audience: the millions of Americans who still trying to discover what Obama really believes.

If the political capital Obama recently demonstrated at the polls means anything, it should mean that he can pass a health care reform bill based on benefits and savings that he can demonstrate to rank-and-file Americans. If he can convincingly show the country that his reform saves money and promotes the nation’s financial health in the long run, he should have enough popular support to make the insurance/financial industry take a haircut. It is there that Obama could show his populist promise, the one he seems to have betrayed by his trillion-dollar give-away to the banks.

Why haven’t we been offered a cost/benefit analysis? People understand those. If Obama can’t provide one, I’ll bet there is some new Ross Perot out there who could come in with some poster charts on the cost of health care to the nation. Such a man or woman could siphon a victory away from Obama in 3 years. It happened to George H.W. Bush in 1992, and elected a nobody from Arkansas.