by Jules Witcover

When Barack Obama campaigned in 2008 to bring about change in Washington, he talked about both policy and process -- substantive reforms arrived through civility and bipartisanship.

It's turning out for him so far that the two are mutually exclusive. He can get the reforms he wants, especially in health-care insurance, only by playing hardball, using whatever parliamentary weapons available against partisan stonewalling.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the pivotal figure in the fight now coming to a head, combines a smiling facade with a steely and determined interior. Her latest reference to another procedural end run to get the reforms to his desk has the Republicans crying foul, threatening as it does their unvarnished obstructionism.

Finley Peter Dunne's fictional philosopher Mr. Dooley had it right when he declared that "politics ain't beanbag." To visitors from Mars, a beanbag is a soft cloth object filled with beans tossed playfully without lethal threat or intent. It's about as persuasive a weapon as a slap on the wrist.

Pelosi, and Obama, have at last put the beanbags aside, turning the screws on reluctant fellow-Democrats to fall in line, Pelosi is also plotting whatever legislative course is possible to overcome the GOP roadblock and bring this overwrought fight successfully to a conclusion.

Already well aired is the so-called budget reconciliation route -- getting congressional approval by a simple majority rather than the Senate supermajority required to end a filibuster. Now Pelosi is said to be considering another parliamentary approach whereby the House Democratic leadership could simply "deem" the bill passed and avoid another House vote altogether.

This scheme runs contrary to the latest Obama call for a clean "up or down" vote on health care reform. And it has the Republican leadership, which has already declared last rites over any health-care bill this year, screaming the new scheme is unconstitutional.

But the time has long passed for Obama, Pelosi and the rest of the Democratic leadership to worry about such objections as they press for what they want from Congress. Obama can only blame himself for permitting the fight to drag on so long, descending into a circus through his own miscalculations and wishful thinking about bipartisanship. Now he has no recourse than hardball if he is to save health-care reform, as well as his credibility as an effective leader over the next three years.

Republican minority leaders John Boehner and Eric Cantor in the House and Mitch McConnell and Lamar Alexander in the Senate warn that if health-care reform passes, the Democrats will pay heavily in November's congressional elections, and especially if they resort to legislative legerdemain.

If so, why are they and their allies in the insurance industry laboring so diligently to save their opponents from this fate? The Republicans, too, understand that politics ain't beanbag. The most vociferous of them are even predicting the end of democracy as we know it in a headlong plunge into "socialism."

The fear-mongering lament of buying into "government-run" medical care has a hollow ring in a time in which government-run Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid all are among the most cherished of federal policies, especially among the elderly, and particularly now.

Punctuating the sour atmosphere that pervades the public discourse is the current phenomenon of congressional incumbents throwing in the sponge, holding their noses as they announce their retirements. Republicans and Democrats alike are quitting, and none more conspicuously than Democrat Evan Bayh of Indiana, a middle-roader known for working across the aisle over his nearly a dozen years in the Senate.

But presidents cannot simply walk away in the face of adversity, and they can't continue to turn the other cheek in the hope their foes will suddenly cooperate. Obama has finally committed himself to this fight and cannot be deterred, either, by fears of voter dissatisfaction in the fall.

Even if the reforms are passed soon, any possible benefit is not likely to be felt so quickly on Main Street. If he is correct about what they will achieve, the payoff is likely only come to him over the remaining two years of his first term. But he has no other choice than to go all-out now.

 

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A Democratic Reality Check | Jules Witcover

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