All Life Is Problem Solving

This morning, Michael Shear and Ceci Connolly at WaPo, with contributions from Anne Kornblut and Lori Montgomery, tried to get us to believe that the Administration was taken by surprise by progressives’ insistence on a viable PO being included in the Health Care Reform bill. This is an interpretation beyond naive, and also beyond imagination, since it assumes that this White House has no one monitoring the netroots and the blogosphere. Who do they think they’re writing about, George Bush? I think this WaPo piece communicates clearly the following messages. [Read more →]

For the past few days, I’ve been trying, by e-mail, to get the participants in the Northern Virginia Move-on Council to take my advice about the best way to get a good, strong, public option. Namely, to abandon the public option advocacy in favor of all-out support for “Medicare for All,” and specifically for HR 676, John Conyers’ bill. My efforts at this have been quite unsuccessful.

Today, I went to a face-to-face meeting called by the Council to plan activities for the rest of this month to provide explicit support for a “strong public option.” At the meeting I questioned the continuing strategy of Move-on calling for support for a strong public option. In one way or another, I made most of the points I made here. [Read more →]

Yesterday afternoon, my wife and I kept an appointment we’d made through Organizing for America to see an aide to Jim Moran’s (D-VA) in order to discuss health care reform. When we walked into the Congressman’s office, one of his aides, a gentlemen by the name of Andy, was talking with another constituent, who, as it turned out, worked for Kaiser Permanente’s education and training branch. My wife and I agreed to join the discussion, and, for some time we listened to the Kaiser employee’s strong and enthusiastic pitch for the Congressman to support a meaningful public option. [Read more →]

Of course, all of us have heard about one of the President’s favorite maxims, “the perfect is the enemy of the good,” with its implication that practicality most often calls for us to forego our attempts to reach a hard to achieve or impossible ideal, in favor of acting to achieve a good result that, while not ideal; certainly represents an improvement in our current situation. It’s very hard to disagree with a proposition like that; but while there’s nothing wrong with the idea behind it; the devil is in the details of how you apply it. [Read more →]

For some time now, I’ve been hearing what Kip Sullivan calls the “yes, but” position on health care reform. That position says roughly that yes, Medicare for All, is the best available solution for the problems besetting our health insurance system; but, unfortunately, Medicare for All is not “on the table” right now, so we have to push for the public option. I’m afraid I think that as a basis for a strategy of engagement with Congress, both in and outside of town hall venues, this position is very ill-considered. [Read more →]

The politics of health insurance reform is a great example of reflexivity. Reflexivity is the idea that acceptance and assertion of our beliefs about reality, has an effect on how we act, which, in turn, has an effect on reality, and to some extent creates it; and, equally, reality influences what we think about it and how we act, thus closing a reflexive circle. George Soros who has written a lot about reflexivity focuses on the idea of interference and specifically on the interaction of the cognitive and manipulative functions underlying human decision making and action.

In current health insurance reform politics, it was decided early on that America wasn’t ready for a Medicare for All, single payer program, and therefore that it was not feasible to try to pass such a program. This decision seems to have been made collectively by key members of the Obama Administration, including the President, as well as key members of Congress including the heads of important committees such as Teddy Kennedy, Charlie Rangel, George Miller and others, The Speaker of the House, and the Majority Leader of the Senate. Outside of the Government, progressive interest groups such as Move-on and Health Care for America Now (HCAN), also made that judgment early on, and have supported the Administration in taking “single payer off the table.” In addition, key influential individuals like John Podesta and George Soros have supported this view, with Soros becoming one of the major financial benefactors of HCAN. [Read more →]

My critique of Soros’s ideas on reflexivity in my two previous blogs on this subject, and my distinction between sequential and simultaneous reflexivity, was in no way a criticism of his application of the notion of reflexivity to various public issues in his Open Society, The Age of Fallibility, and The Crash of 2008. In those works, he uses the sequential reflexivity idea to explain patterns we see in economics and politics that were unexpected when they occurred, and to predict the Crash of 2008 before it occurred. I think Soros’s work, even if it has not supported the idea of simultaneous reflexivity, has shown that sequential reflexivity, whether a new idea of not, is a tool for thinking about economics and politics that cannot be neglected. There is a very dynamic relationship between our beliefs and what we do, and we often try to change reality, in order to confirm what we believe, and even want to believe. And that’s why I think his applications of sequential reflexivity to various social phenomena are valuable, despite his conceptual problems with “reflexivity.” His pleas in book after book to get us to attend to “reflexivity,” and his examples emphasizing sequential reflexivity, heighten our awareness that our commitments to certain views of the way world is, will affect the way the world is, and require us to think through very carefully what claims about the world we ought to be making. [Read more →]

Over the past weekend, Ceci Connolly of WaPo contributed a classic example of modern MSM journalistic writing, a piece that looked like it had been written by tying together a bunch of index cards with a minimum of prose, a “clop-clop style,” and a near absence of any semblance of logic or transition from one paragraph to another. Let’s take a look at some of Ceci’s minimalist and disjointed paragraphs from the viewpoint of fixing the President’s messaging by communicating and advocating “Medicare for All.”

”Now, as lawmakers begin to flee Washington for a month-long recess, the White House team is retooling its message and strategy, hoping a more modest approach will reinvigorate Obama’s signature domestic policy initiative and give him a first-year victory for Democrats to carry into the 2010 midterm elections.” [Read more →]

In an earlier post on fixing Obama’s message machine, I argued that his primary problem was one of content. The vague public option and insurance exchange idea associated with the plan isn’t something that people easily understand. And progressive cadres that do understand it don’t love it because many of them see “Medicare for All” as far superior. My advice to the Administration was to change direction, go back to the beginning and advocate “Medicare for All.” A couple of days after I made my case, Jonathan Walker, in a post entitled “Why Obama Now Needs the Public Plan, contends that to get reform, Obama needs to rally the base of the Party, and that, in turn: “The only thing which can rally the base is the public option.” [Read more →]

Chris Matthews asks: “What happened to the Obama message machine.” And Dee Dee Myers and Tony Blankley dutiful provide various off the mark answers about fear and insecurity. But, also, it’s clear to all three that Obama’s message on health care doesn’t have the same clarity as his message during the campaign, and they attribute that to his vagueness in the absence of a specific proposal for reform that he is advocating. In short, the failure of “the Obama messaging machine” is not due to a deterioration in the messaging machine, but to an absence of specific content that people can understand and organize around, and that Obama can deliver and repeat again and again. That content must be something that people can easily understand and that is resistant to the Republican lying machine. [Read more →]