Obama faces difficult times as healthcare debate looms

AMERICA: WILL AMERICA return to its senses when Congress reconvenes on Tuesday? After mass migration to cloud cuckoo-land over…

AMERICA:WILL AMERICA return to its senses when Congress reconvenes on Tuesday? After mass migration to cloud cuckoo-land over the summer recess, can President Barack Obama regain the initiative?, writes LARA MARLOWE

The past month has seen violence at town hall meetings intended to provide a democratic debate on healthcare reform. Obama was called a “Nazi” and “Hitler”. A fundamentalist preacher in Arizona prayed for his death, and for that of homosexuals. The White House defended the second amendment right of thugs to possess rifles outside presidential venues.

There seemed to be no stopping the myths which republicans propagated about “Obamacare”: that it would establish “death panels” (former vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s term) that could “pull the plug on grandma” (the words of Senator Charles Grassley). Other false allegations said public monies would finance abortion and provide medical care for illegal immigrants.

Now, conservatives have turned a televised September 8th Obama speech to high school students in Virginia into a political football. The White House says Obama will exhort students to work hard and stay in school, but right-wing websites and talk show hosts say he wants to “indoctrinate” them with “socialist ideology”.

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First prize for lunacy goes to Canadian commentator Mark Steyn, who accuses Obama of trying to establish a “personality cult” like Saddam Hussein or North Korean leader Kim Jong-il.

Unpleasant as the right-wing spoilers may be, the deepest cuts are coming from Obama’s liberal and progressive supporters, many of whom turned against him in August, when he seemed poised to jettison the “public option” – the establishment of government health insurance that would compete with private healthcare.

Republicans oppose the public option as it will undermine the mega-rich healthcare industry. So do conservative democrats known as “blue dogs”, many of whom get campaign funds from the industry.

American liberals were already disillusioned over Obama’s reluctance to prosecute the torturers of George W Bush’s “war on terror”. They deplored the continuation of military tribunals for alleged terrorists and the president’s skiddishness on abortion and homosexual rights. Obama’s wavering on the public option was a bridge too far.

"Mr Obama was never going to get everything his supporters wanted," the Nobel-prize winning economist Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times. "But there's a point at which realism shades over into weakness, and progressives increasingly feel that the administration is on the wrong side of that line."

"If Obama is losing Paul Krugman," Howard Kurtz observed in the Washington Post, "Can the rest of the left be far behind?" There's been a barrage of criticism from the left. Eugene Robinson, the Washington Postcolumnist whom Obama telephoned when Robinson won a Pulitzer Prize last spring, said Obama needed to "tell Congress and the American public, clearly and forcefully, what has to be done and why. Take control of the debate. Consult less and insist more . . . Giving up on the public option might be expedient. But we didn't elect Obama to be an expedient president. We elected him to be a great one."

Upon his inauguration, Obama was widely compared to Franklin D Roosevelt, who steered the US through the Great Depression and the second World War. This week, FDR's biographer, Jean Edward Smith, found Obama wanting: "This fixation on securing bipartisan support for healthcare reform suggests that the Democratic Party has forgotten how to govern and the White House has forgotten how to lead," she wrote in the New York Times.

The most charitable version of left-wing criticism of Obama is that he’s Mr Nice Guy, over-eager to achieve consensus at a time of polarisation in US politics. Put more bluntly, Obama’s supporters fear he is weak.

Between the looming healthcare debate in Congress, the highest unemployment in 26 years (at 9.7 per cent), renewed violence in Iraq, the tug-of-war over troop levels in Afghanistan and a September 15th ultimatum to Iran to come clean on its nuclear programme, Obama faces a hellish month.

The US is growing impatient with Obama’s fence-sitting on healthcare. Commentators say he “over-learned” the lessons of Bill Clinton’s healthcare debacle in 1993-94, and has been too cautious. This week, politicians and commentators on both sides urged him to show leadership.

As if on cue, the White House announced Obama will address a joint session of Congress on September 9th. Vice-president Joe Biden promised the speech will explain in “clear terms what our administration wants to happen with regard to healthcare, and what we are going to push for specifically”.

The president is mulling over this dilemma this Labor Day weekend. If he sticks with the public option, which was part of his campaign platform, he’ll lose the republicans and the “blue dogs”. If he drops it, he risks alienating his own political family.