Monday, August 10, 2009

The Objective is Real Reform, Not "Winning"

Over the last couple of weeks during Obama's meetings with members of the Douche Caucus, several stories leaked out saying that he had assured them that opposed ads being run against them by progressive groups. I didn't write anything about it because like a few others, I assumed he was just bullshitting them to make them feel better and massage their martyr complexes, since if he really wanted to stop the ads, he would have made efforts to do so. Well it looks like I was wrong, those efforts have in fact been made:

The Politico’s Jonathan Martin reported this morning that Rahm Emanuel warned leaders of liberal groups in a private meeting this week that it was time to stop running ads attacking Blue Dog and “centrist” Dems on health care.

I’m told, however, that Emanuel went quite a bit further than this.

Sources at the meeting tell me that Emanuel really teed off on the Dem-versus-Dem attacks, calling them “f–king stupid.” This was a direct attack on some of the attendees in the room, who are running ads against Dems right now.

Tellingly, Rahm raised the specter of a loss on health care, sources at the meeting say — which suggests that the White House may be less certain about victory than officials allow publicly.

“He started out with, `We’re 13 and 0 going into health care,’” one source at the meeting said, meaning that Rahm was touting the White House’s string of pre-health care legislative victories.

I'm not going to rehash for the 500th time why he's wrong, so I'll just say it's "fucking stupid" to think that running ads against the douche caucus is "fucking stupid".

But if nothing else, it's a perfect example of how Rahm operates. He wants to win, and he doesn't care about the costs. And if you don't care about passing a good health care bill or a bad one, it makes it very easy to negotiate deals with your foes.

Make shady behind the scenes deals with insurance companies to get them on board?

Why not? It boosts insurance company profits and their support will help our chances of winning.

Drop the public option in favor of worthless "Co-ops"
that can't actually compete with insurance companies?

Done! If it makes it easier to win the votes of Democrats who are bought and paid for by those same insurance companies, then why not? And who cares that we don't need their votes to pass the bill? If we take out the most meaningful section of the bill we can get 60 votes, and that's a far greater priority than actually crafting a good bill.

With Rahm's genius gameplan, there's no need to worry about any other legislative battles. If you just let the opposition get whatever they want and immediately surrender the most meaningful parts of the bill, you can win every time!

14-0!

Wooooooooooo!

1 comment:

  1. at this rate it's going to be a victory-filled 4 years, until 2012 when obama is run out of town because his attempts to win over republicans haven't accomplished anything other than pissing off liberals.

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