Malpractice

...and, we're back!

A little post on health care, here. Yglesias thinks Democrats should have taken on the issue back when Obama was more popular:

Looking at the trends, it’s clear that congressional democrats Max Baucus blundered in terms of actually making health reform happen by delaying so much. If he’d written a bill—any bill—back when President Obama was more popular, it might have been possible for Obama to deploy his popularity in order to pressure moderate senators to vote for the bill. By waiting, the leverage has largely dissipated.

The thing is, they did. Obama's big push for health care started in June, when his approval rating was still in the 60s. Since then, health care has been about the only thing he's focused on, and his approval rating has gone steadily downhill. Blaming Baucus for introducing the bill too late is possibly the lamest excuse I've heard yet for the ongoing Hindenburg-like slow-motion crash of health reform.

In fact, Yglesias is probably the-opposite-of-right. Health care was never one of the most pressing problems facing our nation - it's a massive long-term threat, yes, but not something that absolutely needed to be overhauled in the middle of a depression. My guess is that Obama went after health reform beause it's the thorniest, trickiest, scariest issue in American politics, and (like Clinton in '93) he wanted to tackle it while his electoral mandate was still fresh. And, like Clinton in '93, he ended up dumping much of his political capital down the health-care toilet without much of anything to show for it.

So count me in the "disapprove" column regarding Obama's job perormance. The stimulus bill was OK (too many tax cuts, not enough infrastructure spending, but OK). The Iraq withdrawal has proceeded apace. The most heinous of Bush's edicts have been reversed. And that's about it in terms of success. The Afghanistan war is going downhill. The cap-and-trade bill is next-to-useless without carbon tariffs, and has little chance of getting passed anyway. Health care is a flaming wreck. Bailouts have propped up our zombie finance industry, which is back to its old tricks. Fixing infrastructure and education, not to mention the ongoing massive trade imbalance with China, are not even on the horizon.

And the man at fault for this is not Max Baucus. It is not any Republican or conservative (though conservatives have indeed gone nihilistically insane, it's not like they've been otherwise at any point in the past 15 years). It is Barack Obama himself. By insisting on compromising with Republican political suicide-bombers who will never compromise this side of Paradise, by outsourcing the health reform bill to the congressional Democrats, and by trying to fix the long-term problems before the short-term problems, Obama has proven himself to be a much less effective leader than I had hoped.

Of course, there's still time for him to learn on the job. Clinton did. But what we need today is more FDR than Clinton. We need someone to transform our basic institutions, not simply a competent manager to steer the ship. I'm still rooting for Obama, but my expectations are heading south.