Hey wait a minute, who's running this country anyways?

President Obama ran on change.  Is change what we got with healthcare?  Maybe it seems like change to a voter trying to check things off a list, but to me it sounds like more of the same.  Maybe it feels like change for the President’s own party faithful.  But I ask the question again, is change what we got?  I had to smile at this line that I picked out of the Sunday NY Times:  “What if they through a revolution and nobody came?”

The truth is President Obama never really showed us his healthcare hand.  Perhaps he truly recognizes the problem of mushrooming U.S. healthcare costs, particularly in light of the eminent retirement of the baby boom, but if I had to guess, this is what his brain trust were thinking:

First, they wanted to show a big “win” to voters.  He did get a little bump in the polls (and he stopped the slide, which for him was huge) and a “trophy” or “skin” to hang on the wall.  But it came at a great cost—he jeopardized his Democratic Congress and his future legislative agenda.  But most importantly, he has inflicted more damage to the country.  The guy who billed himself as the great healer has torn the country apart and he still hasn’t touched the biggest issues:  debt, government overreach, Wall Street Banking reform, and energy. 

Secondly, I imagine he may have truly wanted to insure the “notch” group—those “46 million” he kept talking about during the campaign, but he did it at the expense of senior citizens (which may or may not be a bad thing), but more importantly he did it at the expense of long-term deficit reduction.

Most of my friends bemoan the fact that this is big government—and I hear them.  The only thing I would say is wake up; the government is already the primary provider of health care.  We lost that battle years ago.  Your baby is already ugly.  The health care industry would crash like an addict going cold turkey if the government didn’t subsidize seniors and the poor, and most of us know it—particularly the elderly!

We are all so stuck in process that we can’t help ourselves.  We all know things have to change, but we’re too scared to do anything about it, so we go back to our accepted definitions of right and wrong, right and left, black and white.  We know that Oprah’s love fest isn’t reality, but we don’t want that guy holding the sign running the country either.  President Obama is not a fascist–maybe a socialist but let’s stop labeling everything for a moment and take a deep breath.

The most amazing thing is that President Obama actually sold FDR/New Deal policies as new ideas and change.  We Republicans should stop and figure that one out.  This country is split into thirds, and those who control the middle will control policy, or else the whole thing falls on its face—and that is an alternative where the country gets even sicker.