Bigger than Health Care

For the first time since Obama came onto the national stage, I’ve heard disgruntled chatter from the voting bloc he takes most for granted: young progressives. We were the backbone and energy of his campaign, and our inboxes are still flooded weekly with calls for volunteers and donations. But as health- care reform stalls and sours, many of us are losing confidence. And if I were Obama, I’d be worried about this more than anything. Because the health-care battle is about more than health care: It’s about whether young Americans will regain faith in the American political system or wake up from the Obama dream and retreat toward complacency and disillusionment.

Like the many millions who campaigned for Obama and celebrated his victory, I was confident going into the summer that significant health-care reform would pass and would define his first year in office, if not his presidency. After all, the time was ripe: President Obama had campaigned hard on health-care reform and now had a mandate. The public seemed to understand that reform was not just a matter of extending care to the growing millions of Americans without it, but also a matter of harnessing out-of-control costs. Despite the best efforts of Fox News, a New York Times/CBS poll in June revealed not only that a large majority of Americans were in favor of fundamentally changing or rebuilding our health-care system, but also that 72 percent of Americans supported a government-sponsored health-care plan to compete with private insurers.

How things have changed. Somewhere along the line we’ve reached a scenario of red-faced middle-aged men screaming and spitting at their senators about Hitler and death panels. Now we’ve heard that a public option, once seen as a central, if not critical, piece of true health-care reform, might be “off the table,” replaced by non-profit cooperatives that studies have shown will not effectively lower insurance costs, supposedly their biggest selling point. In fact, the public option has been sidelined by many as a far-left fixation—as socialized medicine—rather than what it actually is: an option, one that would compete with and keep in check insurance companies that care about our health about as much as the inventors of fried dough. The Democratic Party seems disorganized and fragmented. And, perhaps most surprising, Obama and his administration, the masters of messaging, seem to be losing the communications battle and, with it, the confidence of the American people.

Despite all of this, the most recent Rasmussen poll shows 57 percent of Americans oppose a reform bill that doesn’t include government-run insurance somewhere. And three out of four Americans polled in late August still support a choice between government-run health care and private coverage. It begs the question: If Obama can’t take advantage of such a huge mandate and historical moment, what faith should we have in the rest of his presidency?

So much can be written about this defining moment in American politics, and so much has been, from the increasingly complacent mainstream media to the insurance industry’s frenzied advertising and lobbying against reform. But from the perspective of a young progressive and Obama campaigner, my advice to Obama is this: Don’t bend over backward compromising with people who want as little change as possible. Doing so will not only water down meaningful health-care reform, but it will also prove that there is no “meaningful” change in politics. The power of “Yes we can!” will fade away, and millions of Obama recruits to the political process will conclude that it’s “business as usual” again.

What we need right now, President Obama, is a leader, not a lawyer. Do what’s right for America because, in this case at least, doing what’s right and doing what will get you re-elected are the same.


Michael D. Zakaras is a first year MPP student at the Kennedy School of Government.