Well, it’s not about bipartisanship. I think that has its moments and its peaks and its valleys. It’s civility in the process, I think more than anything else. …when we get back into session, if you want to, if you want to honor Teddy’s memory, it’s to come back and sort of, as I said the other night, to put behind us the blistering days of August and, and to enter the cool days of September and start acting like Senators again where you respect each other. There are differences. You bring that partisanship to the table, but you work out your differences. That’s what’s we were elected to do, that’s what Teddy understood adamantly about the place… When you abandon civility, then you’re going to be in trouble.
…I believe such a grand bipartisan compromise is still possible with health care.
Since the days of Harry Truman, Democrats have wanted universal health coverage, believing that if other industrialized countries can achieve it, surely the United States can. For Democrats, universal coverage speaks to America’s sense of decency and compassion. Democrats also believe that it will lead to a healthier and more productive country.
Since the days of Ronald Reagan, Republicans have wanted legal reform, believing that our economic competitiveness is being shackled by the billions we spend annually on tort costs; an estimated 10 cents of every health care dollar paid by individuals and companies goes for litigation and defensive medicine. For Republicans, tort reform and its health care analogue, malpractice reform, speak to the goal of stronger economic growth and lower costs.
The bipartisan trade-off in a viable health care bill is obvious: Combine universal coverage with malpractice tort reform in health care.
If you have not seen Republican Orrin Hatch’s eulogy of Ted Kennedy, please watch before we forget what a Republic looks like (3 parts). This conservative Mormon and liberal Catholic did it just as our Founders intended. This is a rivalry befitting this great country. This is the real conversation of democracy. If this isn’t the standard your Senator or Congressman strives for, I hope you’ll expect better beginning tomorrow morning. If you don’t, who will?
This video is making the rounds at the speed of light on the left side of the aisle as a convincing and common sense argument for single payer. It is important to recognize that single payer does not mean doctors would be directly employed by the government or hospitals owned by the government. It would mean that everyone would be paid by the government, which does suggest that government will control how much everyone is paid. It is often described as “Medicare for everyone.” Fly in the ointment: Doctors and hospitals lose money given what Medicare is willing to pay (and they don’t negotiate group rates like other insurers, they just tell doctors and hospitals what they’ll pay). A single payer plan (currently an option only in HR 676 which no one thinks has a chance) would have to, unlike Medicare, pay a reasonable market rate to allow doctors and hospitals to stay in business. (No doctors is distinctly horrible for health care.)
Last Tuesday, I attended the Tallahassee health care town hall. I have lived to tell.
No question there was anger. There was also a good dose of tension. I heard random angry comments about government. But there wasn’t violence and to be honest, there weren’t even many raised voices. I think everyone was trying to comport themselves consistent with grown-up-hood, which never makes good news copy. The most disruptive part of the whole shindig was alternating team clapping and I say democracy can survive a little team clapping.
To get into the town hall, I stood (and stood and stood) in line next to a nice minister who didn’t see health care the same way I did and admitted he watched a bit too much Fox News (but then again I probably watch too much MSNBC). We talked honestly and with respect and at least passingly entertained the notion that we might learn something from each other as we whiled away the hour(s)(s)(s).
I left with sore feet and a measure of hope but – to be honest – a larger measure of despair about the unfolding pointless American tragedy that we’ve found our communities pulling apart at the connections we used to have so naturally with each other. If only we had a lot of food and the requisite amount of alcohol (with apologies to my Baptist friends) and maybe a football or two, we might have left the town hall with both a hangover and a new health care bill.
On the way home, just as I was about to drive past a double amputee on the sidewalk (really not making this up) the man tried to take a run at a ramp in his wheelchair and instead fell out of the chair completely and almost into the road.
A good number of people stopped to help him back into his chair, and check to see if he was hurt. A couple of us wheeled him back to what seemed to be his home as best as we could make out from his distorted palsied speech and his pointing. Reaching to restore a bit of the dignity I felt this man had at least temporarily lost, I stopped to introduce myself and shake his hand before I left.
His name was Tony.
Given where I’d just been, I couldn’t help wondering on the way home whether Tony was one of the uninsured or maybe he was one of the people “sucking on the government teat” of Medicaid as had been described more than a time or two by health care reform opponents that night. I think that as most of us think about government help, we easily forget the people who need help in ways so daunting and desperate that if we really appreciated the truth of the matter – that “there but for the grace of God go I” – we’d wake up on the hour in a cold sweat. It’s so comforting to think that what separates us from Tony is big and made of impenetrable steel instead of an unlucky second or two of life taking a horrible turn.
At the end of only two more hours that day, Senator Ted Kennedy – who had spent a lifetime fighting for universal health care – would be dead. A year to the day before he died, Kennedy said of health care: “This is the cause of my life.”
Some days leave you feeling a little shell-shocked.
I’m going to go out on a limb and say that the jury is out on what the heck we’re going to do about health care. What government does versus what we do privately is a real and legitimate question. But last Tuesday, for me the question suddenly had a human face.
We fill the space of our public discourse talking about what’s wrong with some other guy, some other political party, some other country. And to be sure plenty is wrong with “them.” Volumes could be written (and have) on how Ted Kennedy fell short in his life.
In keeping with the hateful way we have come to see each other, some were posting putrid partisan obits of Kennedy before I fell asleep on what we’ll call health-care-has-a-face-day. As I read through the nauseating words, the diverging roads we could take from here appeared for me in sharp relief: We could continue to point our fingers, or we could take a look in the mirror and ask ourselves or “or side” where we fall short.
And maybe, just maybe, when we look in the mirror for a passing moment we could imagine finding ourselves without legs lying in the street.
If you didn’t see this today, skip the words… just watch the tape.
“He never was petty. He was never small and in the process of his doing, he made everyone he worked with bigger, both his adversaries as well as his allies. Don’t you find it remarkable that one of the most partisan liberal men in the last century serving in the Senate had so many of his foes embrace him? Because they know he made them bigger, he made them more graceful by the way he conducted himself.
“You know, he changed the circumstances of tens of millions of Americans in a literal sense. He changed also another aspect of it as I observed about him. He changed not only their physical circumstance, he changed how they looked at themselves and how they looked at one another. That’s remarkable… I just hope we remember how he treated other people, and how he made other people look at themselves and look at one another. That will be the truly fundamentally unifying legacy of Teddy Kennedy’s life if that happens, and it will for a while, at least in the Senate.”
Republican Senator Orrin Hatch eulogized Democratic Senator Ted Kennedy early this morning on news of his passing:
“In the current climate of today’s United States Senate it is rare to find opportunities where both sides can come together and work in the middle to craft a solution for our country’s problems. Ted Kennedy, with all of his ideological verbosity and idealism was a rare person who at times could put aside differences and look for common solutions. Not many ever got to see that side of him, but as peers and colleagues we were able to share some of those moments.”
Unless there was a last-minute melee at the health care town hall (we left after 2 hours, one to go), Tallahassee comported herself quite well today in the latest chapter of health care town halls. There was serious difference of opinion, a spark of anger here and there, but overall it was democracy in action. (The crowd weathered bad news about capacity respectfully and the planners clearly had thought through every aspect of the program and made real effort to offer a fair hearing.)
Three cheers for you.
On another democracy-alive-and-well-despite-occasional-body-blows story, Allan Katz’s city commission seat had 70+ takers. While I don’t envy the commissioners who have the job of paring the list down, you’ve got to love it.
So to recap, the picky picky civility police give Tallahassee a big thumbs up on democracy today.
Sing a song of seasons! Something bright in all!
Flowers in the summer, Fires in the fall! – Robert Louis Stevenson
“It’s time to water the tree of Liberty” read the sign carried by a protester at one of President Obama’s recent town-hall events. The quote, taken from Thomas Jefferson, reads: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with blood of patriots and tyrants,” the same quote worn on the shirt of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh the day of the bombing. Not to mention the gentleman holding the sign had also brought a gun with him to the event. Apparently that’s what we’ve come to nowadays.
Which reminds me of the woman who had the audacity to accuse Jewish member of the House of Representatives Barney Frank of supporting Obama’s Hitler policies. “What planet do you spend most of your time” was Frank’s response, but that is probably the PG version of what he really wanted to say. That pales in comparison to the people carrying signs depicting Obama as Hitler. Trivializing such evil is an insult to the millions who suffered and died by his order.
On MSNBC’s “Meet The Press” David Gregory asked Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn about the Tree of Liberty quote. “I’m troubled any time when we stop having confidence in our government,” the senator said, “but we’ve earned it.”
I believe there is something very serious going on here. There is a fire burning. In April the Department of Homeland Security issued a report, originally commissioned by the Bush administration, on the rising threat of violent right-wing extremism. It was ridiculed by conservatives, including the Republican National Commitee chairman Michael Steele, who called it “the height of insult.” Since the report, a neo-Nazi and Obama “birther” murdered a guard at the Holocaust museum in Washington and an anti-abortion radicalist gunned down a doctor on the steps of his church in Wichita, Kansas.
There has been a simmering undertone of violence in American politics since last October when then Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin did nothing to condemn the calls of “terrorist” and “off with his head” at her rallies. Frank Rich of the New York Times describes the uptick of violence as a panic about a new era of cultural and demographic change. “As the sociologist Daniel Bell put it, ‘What the right as a whole fears is the erosion of its own social position, the collapse of its power, the increasing incomprehensibility of a world — now overwhelmingly technical and complex — that has changed so drastically within a lifetime.’”
There is a war going on and its target is not just Democratic ideas or liberal ideology, but the ideals and values our nation was founded on. Republicans deserve partial blame for not offering a voice of peace and reason. Conservative columnist Kathleen Parker suggests that when the Hitler comparisons come on, the cameras should go off.
Let’s hope that cooler minds prevail.
Luke Inhen is a graduate student at Florida State University in political science. If you’re interested in submitting a column from anther perspective (must be civil) you may make a submission to thecrier@tothevillagesquare.org).
In a study titled “There Must Be a Reason: Osama, Saddam and Inferred Justification” published in the journal Sociological Inquiry, sociologists from four major research institutions looked into the high level of persistent belief in America that Saddam Hussein and Iraq were responsible for the attacks of 9/11, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. The study results:
“Our data shows substantial support for a cognitive theory known as ‘motivated reasoning,’ which suggests that rather than search rationally for information that either confirms or disconfirms a particular belief, people actually seek out information that confirms what they already believe…The study demonstrates voters’ ability to develop elaborate rationalizations based on faulty information. The argument here is that people get deeply attached to their beliefs.”
The researchers describe the observed pattern of motivated reasoning is a “serious challenge to democratic theory and practice that results when citizens with incorrect information cannot form appropriate preferences or evaluate the preferences of others.”
Ya think?
So, to recap… We’ve broken ourselves into feuding teams which are no longer making governing decisions based on reality but on what we want to pretend is true?
Great.
(Postscript: If you’re liberal and feeling smug right about now, then think again. You do it too.)
