Health care and the waning of progressive enthusiasm

This was initially written and has been cross-posted at Red, Brown and Blue, which is the politics blog for Tufts Office of Undergrad Admissions.

Let me know what you think, I'd love to see a debate on this topic.



I know it’s summer and some of us have more important things going on than following politics and reading this blog, but luckily for you all, I don’t. I’m relaxing and mentally preparing to head back to Tufts in the fall for senior year, but politics never fade far from my mind. This summer we’ve seen a very intense health care debate flaring up all over the country (even in liberal suburban Connecticut: check this out).

Commentary from the left and the right persistently asks the question: why are conservatives so passionate, so mobilized, and getting so much publicity, when all of those Obama liberals might as well be invisible? Well, for one, Democratic activists haven’t been silent, health care demonstrations around the country have attracted hundreds and even thousands of participants in support of reform, and amidst the loudest anti-reform voices, there are quiet, more polite liberals in the background. But I digress.

Democrats who supported Obama haven’t been as vocal in support of this reform bill as they could have been. The progressive grass- and netroots that did most of the legwork to elect President Obama have been relatively quiet and laid-back as the health care debate gets going. The energy and excitement coursing through Obama supporters in the campaign of 2008 is nowhere to be found.

Jonathan Cohn calls it “The Enthusiasm Gap” in a recent article in The New Republic. Polls are showing that Americans still largely support the major components of health care reform as proposed by the White House, but…well, no one seems to be doing anything about it. Crazies on the right are up in arms, hanging their representatives in effigy and accusing Obama and Democrats of being everything from socialists to granny-murderers, and the response from the left has been…casual, to say the least. No one seems to know why, but I have a few ideas.

Liberals are ambivalent about the legislation on the table to reform health care because, in essence, they’re worthless, watered-down proposals that won’t have much of an effect. As a proponent of single-payer health care, which would not only reduce costs to the individual but actually cover everybody, the bill Barack Obama is pushing is disappointing, to say the least. Most depressing, we can look back at the Hillary-care effort from 1993 longingly; that proposal included many of the provisions we are losing every day. Now, Obama-care is but a shadow of the long lost reform efforts of the Clinton administration. There is even talk that the public option may be dropped entirely.

Is this change we can believe in? More importantly, the first few months of the Obama administration have disappointed progressives on numerous other levels. One of the President’s first official actions was to bailout corporations like AIG to the tune of nearly a trillion dollars, and he has been slow to act on many campaign issues that got him elected in the first place: Afghanistan is getting worse, not better; the pull-out of Iraq has been slow and with only mixed results; and the Bush-era crimes against humanity have yet to be investigated, let lone prosecuted. The list of disappointents is miles long.

As any self-respecting liberal ought to tell you, we as a movement are far from giving up. The recent Netroots Nation convention of progressive bloggers and activists confirms that there is still energy and excitement on the left for “change we can believe in”. But we’re tired of the endless compromises coming out of the White House and the Democratic caucus in both chambers of Congress. We worked to elect the President, and finally, for the first time in my political life, I expected to have a voice, however small, in the decision-making process in Washington. It hasn’t quite materialized–although I’m not ready to give up yet.

And whenever I get really down about the lack of progress on important issues like health care, I remind myself that it could certainly be worse. Imagine the country under President McCain and–I shudder to think–Vice President Palin. A scary picture indeed.