I recently saw a man in the street brandishing a sign with that ridiculous slogan. I’m not sure who he thought he was convincing, and to be honest, I was afraid to ask.
But I found it a little hilarious, and not just because someone thinks the Führer was really into a public option. I find it hilarious because Barack Obama doesn’t have a health care plan. I mean, maybe he has some glorious pet plan he’s been perfecting in his basement that will lower costs, cover everybody, and provide competitive advantages to the Chicago White Sox. But we’re not getting that plan.
We’re getting whatever makes it through Congress’s digestive track. Congress is like a beast that feeds on ideas, keeps whichever parts will make it fatter, and turns the rest into poop.
At the moment, Congress has not finished this aromatic process. There are several variations on plans kicking around Washington, and Democrats have spent most of the summer bickering about them. Yet we constantly hear reporters, talking heads, Republicans and crazy street preachers refer to “the Obama health care plan.”
That’s because we have an entire class of people who get paid exclusively to argue. These people cannot afford to wait until there is one health care bill to yell about. Their mortgages demand they yell now.
But you can’t argue about a half-dozen health care proposals at once, at least not on cable TV. You certainly can’t do it in
30-second ads. So we talk about “the Obama plan,” a substance-free McGuffin anyone can flail away at.
We’re getting screwed by that reductionism. As long as the public thinks of health care reform as one partisan monolith to support or oppose, Democratic congressmen can do whatever they want with the details—and what they want usually amounts to
whatever their health industry donors want. Who’s going to call them on it? Republicans would rather attack the plan as a (nonexistent) whole. They have gleefully discovered that you can say
whatever the heck you want about a nonexistent plan.
The only one who could really lay down the law is Obama, but
he has no interest in attacking his own party. Hell,
he asked bloggers to do it for him. Rahm Emanuel, meanwhile, has assured us that everything is open to discussion. I guess that’s the Obama plan:
whatever you can pass, boys.
Which brings me back to Hitler, a take-charge kind of leader if ever there was one. Barack Obama, thankfully, is not a racist genocidal maniac bent on world domination. He’s not planning to kill your grandma or make you goose step. He’s not even planning to make you use government-run health care. But it would be nice if he was planning anything at all.
