The can’t-do attitude of Blue Dogs

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

"We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too."

– John F. Kennedy – speech at The American University, Washington, D.C., June 10, 1963

On Monday this nation celebrated the 40th Anniversary of the Apollo moon landing, one of the crowning achievements of America's can-do spirit and optimism that no challenge is too great to be overcome by our imagination, ingenuirty and ability to overcome any challenge. This can-do spirit defines who we are as Americans.

This country has survived and thrived by overcoming depressions, panics, civil war, two world wars and numerous other calamities, wars and disasters. Americans have always risen to the challenge – no challenge is too great to be overcome. We are Americans!

Where is this American can-do spirit today when it comes to addressing one of the most pressing issues of the day: health care reform?

Democrats have super-majorities in both chambers of Congress and a popular president in the White House who has made health care reform his top legislative priority. This should be a no-brainer.

But we have a group of so-called fiscal conservative Democrats who call themselves Blue Dog Democrats (the name itself is meant to symbolize defiance to party discipline, "mavericks" if you will. It is meant to be the opposite of the "yellow dog" Democrat of past history — "I'd vote for a yellow dog if he was a Democrat").

Many of these Blue Dogs voted with President Bush for his tax give-aways to wealthiest Americans, his reckless spending that doubled our national debt in eight years, and supported his war of choice in Iraq – to the tune of more than $1 trillion dollars and rising. I question their "fiscal conservative" credentials. They were enablers to a Republican president and now threaten to defy a president of their own political party.

The Blue Dogs are principally concerned with their own reelection and continuity in office. They tend to defend and preserve the status quo as it is represented to them by Washington lobbyists (where many of them hope to land a good paying job after leaving public office).

A bigger bunch of whiners and obstructionists I have not encountered since the days of the segregationist Dixiecrats of decades past. America's can-do spirit overcame the obstructionist Dixiecrats, and it will overcome the obstructionist Blue Dogs as well. They are no match for millions of Americans who believe that no challenge is too great to be overcome. The Blue Dogs can join this march of history or be run over by it — history will treat them as unfavorably as the Dixiecrats who stood in the way of civil rights.

This is your "profiles in courage" moment Blue Dogs, your rendezvous with destiny — on which side of history will you stand?

Harold Meyerson of the Washington Post in his opinion addresses The Blue Dogs' Can't-Do Attitude and the Health-Care Debate:

Watching the centrist Democrats in Congress create more and more reasons why health care can't be fixed, I've been struck by a disquieting thought: Suppose our collective lack of response to Hurricane Katrina wasn't exceptional but, rather, the new normal in America. Suppose we can no longer address the major challenges confronting the nation. Suppose America is now the world's leading can't-do country.

Every other nation with an advanced economy long ago secured universal health care for its citizens — an achievement that the United States alone finds beyond the capacities of mortal man. It wasn't ever thus. Time was when Democratic Congresses enacted Social Security and Medicare over the opposition of powerful interests and Republican ideologues. In fact, our government used to actually pave roads, build bridges and allow for secure retirements by levying taxes on those who could afford to pay them.

To today's centrist Democrats, this has become a distant memory, a history lesson they cannot grasp. The notion that actual individuals might have to pay to secure the national interest appalls them. In the House, the Blue Dogs doggedly oppose proposals to fund universal coverage by taxing the wealthiest 1 percent of the nation's households.

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Centrist Democrats' opposition to health reform verges on the incoherent. A caucus (the Blue Dogs) formed ostensibly to promote balanced budgets now disapproves of the proposed taxes that would cover the expenses of the new programs. The congressional centrists say, commendably, that they want to squeeze more economies out of the system, but they oppose giving more power to an agency that would set the payment scales for physicians.

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The Republican opposition to President Obama's push for health-care reform, on the other hand, makes clear political sense. If they can stop Obama on health care, as South Carolina Republican Sen. Jim DeMint recently noted, it "will be his Waterloo." Why Democrats of any ideology want to cripple their own president in his first year in office, and for seeking an objective that has been a stated goal of their party since the Truman administration, is a more mysterious matter.

Is the additional tax burden on small businesses their concern? If so, good news: The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has found that only the top 4 percent of those businesses would be affected by the surcharge that House Democratic leaders proposed, and that's based on the original proposal, before Speaker Nancy Pelosi altered it to include just the wealthiest fraction of the top 1 percent of Americans. Would such a tax impede an economic recovery? In downturns this severe, it's been broad-based consumer spending and public-sector investment that have revived the economy. Private investment doesn't jump-start a revival of purchasing; it follows it.

But the big picture here, of which the resistance to reforming health care is just one element, is our growing inability to meet our national challenges.

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But act on behalf of the nation as a whole, even if it means goring Wall Street's or Wal-Mart's oxen? Perish the thought. Pass a health-reform bill that will cover 45 million uninsured Americans and slow the ruinous growth of health-care spending? Not if somebody, somewhere, actually has to pay higher taxes. Hey, we're America — the can't-do nation.