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Ralph Nader Letters

November 3, 2009

Matthew P. Hoh, a former U.S. combat marine captain and Department of Defense civilian in Iraq starting in 2004 and until September a political officer in the Foreign Service stationed in Afghanistan is giving some consternation to President Obama’s advisors as the Commander in Chief considers sending more soldiers to that war-torn country next to Pakistan.
 
Mr. Hoh wrote a letter of resignation to the State Department in September. His four page letter frames his doubts about what he said is the “why and to what end” behind “the strategic purposes of the United States’ presence in Afghanistan. He notes that like the Soviets’ nine year occupation, “we continue to secure and bolster a failing state, while encouraging an ideology and system of government unknown and unwanted by its people.”
 
Mr. Hoh focuses on the giant Pashtun society composed of 42 million people and moves to his conclusions. Read his words:
 
“The Pashtun insurgency, which is composed of multiple, seemingly infinite, local groups, is fed by what is perceived by the Pashtun people as a continued and sustained assault, going back centuries, on Pashtun land, culture, traditions and religion by internal and external enemies. The U.S. and NATO presence and operations in Pashtun valleys and villages, as well as Afghan army and police units that are led and composed of non-Pashtun soldiers and police, provide an occupation force against which the insurgency is justified. In both RC East and South, I have observed that the bulk of the insurgency fights not for the white banner of the Taliban, but rather against the presence of foreign soldiers and taxes imposed by an unrepresentative government in Kabul.
 
“The United States military presence in Afghanistan greatly contributes to the legitimacy and strategic message of the Pashtun insurgency. In a like manner our backing of the Afghan government in its current form continues to distance the government from the people. The Afghan government’s failings, particularly when weighed against the sacrifice of American lives and dollars, appear legion and metastatic:
 
• Glaring corruption and unabashed graft;
• A President whose confidants and chief advisers comprise drug lords and war crimes villains, who mock our own rule of law and counternarcotics efforts;
• A system of provincial and district leaders constituted of local power brokers, opportunists and strongmen allied to the United States solely for, and limited by, the value of our USAID and CERP contracts and whose own political and economic interests stand nothing to gain from any positive or genuine attempts at reconciliation; and
• The recent election process dominated by fraud and discredited by low voter turnout, which has created an enormous victory for our enemy who now claims a popular boycott and will call into question worldwide our government’s military, economic and diplomatic support for an invalid and illegitimate Afghan government.
 
“Our support for this kind of government, coupled with a misunderstanding of the insurgency’s true nature, reminds me horribly of our involvement with South Vietnam; an unpopular and corrupt government we backed at the expense of our Nation’s own internal peace, against an insurgency whose nationalism we arrogantly and ignorantly mistook as a rival to our own Cold War ideology.
 
“I find specious the reasons we ask for bloodshed and sacrifice from our young men and women in Afghanistan. If honest, our stated strategy of securing Afghanistan to prevent al-Qaeda resurgence or regrouping would require us to additionally invade and occupy western Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, etc. Our presence in Afghanistan has only increased destabilization and insurgency in Pakistan where we rightly fear a toppled or weakened Pakistani government may lose control of its nuclear weapons. However, again, to follow the logic of our stated goals we should garrison Pakistan, not Afghanistan. More so, the September 11th attacks, as well as the Madrid and London bombings, were primarily planned and organized in Western Europe; a point that highlights the threat is not one tied to traditional geographic or political boundaries. Finally, if our concern is for a failed state crippled by corruption and poverty and under assault from criminal and drug lords, then if we bear our military and financial contributions to Afghanistan, we must reevaluate and increase our commitment to and involvement in Mexico.
 
“Eight years into war, no nation has ever known a more dedicated, well trained, experienced and disciplined military as the U.S. Armed Forces. I do not believe any military force has ever been tasked with such a complex, opaque and Sisyphean mission as the U.S. military has received in Afghanistan. …
 
“’We are spending ourselves into oblivion’ a very talented and intelligent commander, one of America’s best, briefs every visitor, staff delegation and senior officer. We are mortgaging our Nation’s economy on a war, which, even with increased commitment, will remain a draw for years to come. Success and victory, whatever they may be, will be realized not in years, after billions more spent, but in decades and generations. The United States does not enjoy a national treasury for such success and victory. …
 
“Thousands of our men and women have returned home with physical and mental wounds, some that will never heal or will only worsen with time. The dead return only in bodily form to be received by families who must be reassured their dead have sacrificed for a purpose worthy of futures lost, love vanished, and promised dreams unkept. I have lost confidence such assurances can anymore be made. As such, I submit my resignation.”
 
Will Mr. Hoh’s highly regarded experience, sensitivity and judgment reach the attention of millions of Americans? That will depend on whether President Obama meets with him, whether Congressional committees will provide a hearing for him and others of similar persuasion, and whether the mass media will suspend their dittoheading and trivia long enough to report these views, so that we the people can deliberate better about avoiding a devastating, worsening quagmire replete with serial tragedies over there and boomerangs back here.
 
October 26, 2009

I just received a letter from President Obama. Right there on the outside envelope are the words “I need you.” After not answering several letters which I have mailed and faxed to him, I was, for the briefest of moments, curious about this personal plea for help. Then, of course, I realized that it was a form letter from Mr. Obama via the auspices of the Democratic National Committee (DNC).
 
I started reading the two page, single-spaced missive. His words prompt responses.
 
He opens with undeniable declarations, to wit: “There are times in the life of our nation when America’s course can only be set by the concerted effort of citizens determined to pull our country through.
 
This is one of those times—and your personal involvement in moving America forward is absolutely essential.”
 
Just what this “personal involvement” is all about is unclear, other than to make a “contribution of $25, $35 or even $50 to the Democratic National Committee” which is somehow supposed to make sure that “America’s families are actively engaged in the critical decisions that lie ahead.”
 
This money will fund something called “Organizing for America” under the DNC which will unleash “volunteers and activists” to “carry our message…all across this great country of ours.”
 
The “message” includes “reforms that will bring down the cost of health insurance for families.” But Mr. Obama has taken the one reform—single payer, which he used to support—off the table and replaced it with a bill over a 1000 pages that will do just the opposite—to the delight of the drug and health insurance industries (see singlepayeraction.org).
 
Continuing into the letter, Mr. Obama emphasizes that “in communities all across America, people are worried about whether they’re going to have a job and paycheck to count on.”
 
But he has done nothing to support the card check reform to facilitate workers forming unions—an objective he supported during his presidential campaign. Still no push on Congress, no ringing statement of support, as he has uttered numerous times in promoting his various bailouts of Big Business.
 
One way to help low income workers to pay their bills is to elevate the federal minimum wage to $10 an hour which is what the minimum wage was in 1968, adjusted for inflation. The federal minimum wage is now $7.25. Adding $2.75 per hour would increase consumer demand in our faltering real economy.
 
The Democrats and Republicans, who gave bailouts in the trillions of dollars for the paper economy of the mismanaged, speculating, reckless big banks, big investment firms and insurance giants like AIG, should provide some economic assistance to workers on Main Street and not just Wall Street.
 
Mr. Obama writes: “Let’s put America’s future in the hands of people who are willing to work hard, willing to take their responsibilities seriously….” Perhaps Mr. Obama should read the short book by one of his Harvard Law School professors, Richard Parker, titled Here the People Rule. Professor Parker makes a strong case that the government has a constitutional duty to facilitate the political and civic energies of the people.
 
An important pathway toward this objective is to provide facilities whereby the people can easily band together in their nonprofit civic advocacy associations which they would fund themselves. Mr. Obama can start this process now by supporting a provision to establish a financial consumer association (FCA) with the pending legislation to start a consumer financial regulatory agency.
 
Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) supported a Financial Consumer Association in 1985 when he was in the House of Representatives. Remember the savings and loan bailouts?
 
A similar provision can be included in the pending health insurance legislation. These facilities help to redress the present severe imbalance of power between the unorganized people and the corporate power machines which are often taxpayer subsidized and able to deduct lobbying expenses.
 
These consumer facilities have some precedents. In Obama’s home state of Illinois thousands of consumers of electric, telephone and gas companies voluntarily pay their membership dues to their private advocacy group: Illinois CUB (see http://www.citizensutilityboard.org).
 
He asks for our “personal participation.” Well why doesn’t he meet with the leaders of consumer, worker and poverty groups in the White House with the frequency with which he meets with the CEOs of giant corporations in the banking, insurance (Aetna), oil, gas, coal, auto and other commercial interests?
 
Instead he has turned his back on the very constituencies which gave him most of his votes. These are the people who remember Mr. Obama’s campaign promises and all his intonations of “hope and change,” including moving to reform the privileged tax laws for the rich and corporations and revising the notorious trade agreements.
 
Since Mr. Obama wants “personal participation,” how about moving for D.C. statehood or at least his expressed desire for voting rights and Congressional representation for the residents of the nation’s capital? As the months drag on with a Democratic Congress and a Democratic White House, people are losing hope for any change in their present state of political servitude.
 

October 13, 2009
CBO Report On Medical Malpractice Flawed

Stuart Hagen must either be greatly overworked or possessed of an overwhelmingly monetized mind.
   
As the author of a Congressional Budget Office’s reply to the request by Senator Orrin G. Hatch (Rep. Utah) for an “updated analysis” of medical malpractice reform, Hagan neglected to mention a salient tragedy. About 100,000 Americans die every year from medical and hospital negligence or worse in hospitals alone.
   
That loss of life is greater than the annual combined fatalities from motor vehicle crashes, AIDS, and fires. This report on medical and hospital negligence came from physicians at the Harvard School of Public Health. Such preventable fatalities are associated with even larger numbers of preventable sicknesses and injuries. Tens of billions of dollars a year are the economic costs to victims, their next of kin and the economy.
   
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO), led by Douglas W. Elmendorf, is one of two Congressional offices left with any credible reputation—the other being the Government Accountability Office (GAO). The October 9, 2009 five page CBO report belies that reputation (http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/106xx/doc10641/10-09-Tort_Reform.pdf).
   
The customary right-wing reform literature on corporate regulation and tort-law rights dwells on inflated costs and blithely ignores benefits in terms of saving life, limb and property and compensating the aggrieved. This propaganda binge, spasmodically reproduced by the likes of the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and National Review editorialists, started with Murray Weidenbaum, economic advisor to Ronald Reagan. In his first report after leaving office about twenty-five years ago, he arbitrarily declared that federal regulation cost business $150 billion a year—since bloated in subsequent published effusions to over $800 billion. When I asked Mr. Weidenbaum what about the benefits of health and safety from safer cars, food, water, drugs and other products, he replied that was not his research burden. He was focusing on costs.
   
Mr. Hagen’s dispatch to Senator Hatch suffers from the same flawed analysis.
   
In the corporatized world of the Congress, “medical malpractice reform” means limiting the rights of wrongfully injured people to their full day in court. It does not mean reducing the prevalence of medical negligence, incompetence or greed, with all its lethal effects.
   
If reform meant reducing deaths, illness and sickness from bad doctors and bad medicine, powerful commercial interests would have to behave and upgrade their services ranging from prevention to treatment.
   
For example, medical malpractice insurance companies would have to experience-rate their physicians and surcharge the small percentage of recidivist, negligent or incompetent doctors. Drug companies would have to be subjected to stronger safety standards and recall obligations and stop their payola to physicians to get them to prescribe unnecessary medications or improper medications in our overdrugged society.
   
Also, state medical examining agencies would expand their staff and have their authority strengthened to remove the licenses of the small percentage of physicians who should not be practicing medicine at all. As Business Week editorialized years ago, the medical malpractice crisis is malpractice.
   
Hospitals, as some already are doing, would be cracking down on hospital induced infections with improved monitoring and simple sanitation like handwashing. The Centers for Disease Control estimates 260 to 270 deaths a day, 99,000 per year, due to hospital-induced infections.
   
Obviously these are not the kinds of human protections and cost-reductions on the minds of the Hatch Republicans and some lobby-indentured Democrats like Senator Max Baucus (Dem. Montana). But the CBO should not be reflecting this political slant. Like the Office of Technology Assessment, which Congress abolished in 1995, the CBO’s job is to convey the truth as best they see it regardless of the angle desired by Senators or Representatives.
   
The Center for Justice & Democracy (CJD) has just issued a fair critique of the CBO letter to Senator Hatch (http://www.centerjd.org/archives/issues-facts/CJDCBOCritiqueF.pdf). CJD points out the savings, both human and economic, that come with the deterrent effects of the tort law system. Among the studies cited is the Institute of Medicine finding that “[T]he litigation system seems to protect many patients from being injured in the first place. And since prevention before the fact is generally preferable to compensation after the fact, the apparent injury prevention effect must be an important factor in the debate about the future of the malpractice litigation system.”
   
Further, in the May 11, 2006 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, the CJD argued that “anesthesiologists were motivated by litigation to improve patient safety.” As a result, “the risk of death from anesthesia” was reduced from “1 in 5000 to about 1 in 250,000.”
   
Less than one in ten malpractice cases results in a legal claim for compensation. What physicians and hospitals pay in malpractice premiums annually is less than the cost of dog and cat food—under $10 billion.
   
Mr. Hagen and associates provided estimates of five “typical proposals, starting with a cap of $250,000 on pain and suffering for the most serious injuries. Such proposals have been the subject of various state rejections or enactments without significantly affecting the prices charged for malpractice insurance premiums. Even if they did, the human cruelty and pervasions of the insurance function itself should negate their adoption.
   
The CBO letter did not include the costs to Medicaid when victims do not receive an adequate award or settlement in court, to cite several omissions noted in the CJD analysis. CBO’s treatment of “defensive medicine” is thin, neglecting to point out that incentives for additional billing are factors; while invasive, non-indicated procedures for fear of fancied liability are themselves acts of malpractice.
   
Messrs Elmendorf and Hagen: even the best companies have bad days. It is time for a CBO recall!
 
September 4, 2009

Ever wonder what’s happening to words once they fall into the hands of corporate and government propagandists? Too often reporters and editors don’t wonder enough. They ditto the words even when the result is deception or doubletalk.
   
Here are some examples. Day in and day out we read about “detainees” imprisoned for months or years by the federal government in the U.S., Guantanamo Bay, Iraq and Afghanistan. Doesn’t the media know that the correct word is “prisoners,” regardless of what Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld disseminated?
   
The raging debate and controversy over health insurance and the $2.5 trillion spent this year on health care involves consumers and “providers.” How touching to describe sellers or vendors, often gouging, denying benefits, manipulating fine print contracts, cheating Medicare and Medicaid in the tens of billions as “providers.”
   
I always thought “providers” were persons taking care of their families or engaging in charitable service. Somehow, the dictionary definition does not fit the frequently avaricious profiles of Aetna, United Healthcare, Pfizer and Merck.
   
“Privatization” and the “private sector” are widespread euphemisms that the press falls for daily. Moving government owned assets or functions into corporate hands, as with Blackwater, Halliburton, and the conglomerates now controlling public highways, prisons, and drinking water systems is “corporatization,” not the soft imagery of going “private” or into the “private sector.” It is the corporate sector!
   
“Medical malpractice reform” is another misnomer. It used to mean restricting the legal rights of wrongfully injured people by hospitals and doctors, or limiting the liability of these corporate vendors when their negligence harms innocent patients. Well, to anybody interested in straight talk, “medical malpractice reform” or the “medical malpractice crisis” should apply to bad or negligent practices by medical professionals. After all, about 100,000 people die every year from physician/hospital malpractice, according to a Harvard School of Public Health report. Hundreds of thousands are rendered sick or injured, not to mention even larger tolls from hospital-induced infections. Proposed “reforms” are sticking it to the wrong people—the patients—not the sellers.
   
“Free trade” is a widely used euphemism. It is corporate managed trade as evidenced in hundreds of pages of rules favoring corporations in NAFTA and the World Trade Organization. “Free trade” lowers barriers between countries so that cartels, unjustified patent monopolies, counterfeiting, contraband, and other harmful practices and products can move around the world unhindered.
   
What is remarkable about the constant use of these words is that they permeate the language even if those who stand against the policies of those who first coin these euphemisms. You’ll read about “detainees” and “providers” and “privatization” and “private sector” and “free trade” in the pages of the Nation and Progressive magazines, at progressive conferences with progressive leaders, and during media interviews. After people point out these boomeranging words to them, still nothing changes. Their habit is chronic.
   
A lot of who we are, of what we do and think is expressed through the language we choose. The word tends to become the thing in our mind as Stuart Chase pointed out seventy years ago in his classic work The Tyranny of Words. Let us stop disrespecting the dictionary! Let’s stop succumbing to the propagandists and the public relations tricksters!
   
Frank Luntz—the word wizard for the Republicans who invented the term “death tax” to replace “estate tax” is so contemptuous of the Democratic Party’s verbal ineptitude (such as using “public option” instead of “public choice” and regularly using the above-noted misnomers) that he dares them by offering free advice to the Democrats. He suggests they could counteract his “death tax” with their own term “the billionaires’ tax.” There were no Democratic takers. Remember, words matter.
 
Using words that are accurate and at face value is one of the characteristics of a good book. Three new books stand out for their straight talk. In Grand Illusion: The Myth of Voter Choice in a Two-party Tyranny, Theresa Amato, my former campaign manager, exposes the obstructions that deny voter choice by the two major parties for third party and independent candidates. Just out is Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle by Pulitzer Prize winner, Chris Hedges. Lastly, the boisterous, mischievous short autobiography of that free spirit, Jerry Lee Wilson , The Soloflex Story: An American Parable.
   
Not withstanding their different styles, these authors exercise semantic discipline.
 
End.
 
 
August 31, 2009

After several weeks of protests at Senate hearings and health care events by single payer advocates (visit singlepayeraction.org), six physicians from Oregon, with 191 years of combined real-world medical experience, are crossing the country in a 27-foot Winnebago making stops in nearly 30 cities, to debate, educate and advance full medicare for all. Everybody in, nobody out.
 
Calling themselves “Mad as Hell Doctors,” these physicians are already drawing crowds and expect thousands to turn out at each city that they visit, culminating in a large arrival demonstration in front of the White House around October 1. (Visit www.madashelldoctors.com)
 
They have written President Obama asking for a meeting “to discuss the future of health care as well as the moral, social, and fiscal imperative of enacting a single-payer system for America at this moment in our history.”
 
The White House turned them down flat, not even leaving the door open for reconsideration. Mr. Obama has met countless times with the CEOs of large corporations, whose greed and callousness causes so much of this crisis. Though he believes in single payer “if we started from scratch,” he has yet to meet with any single payer delegation.
 
The White House has shown that it lacks smarts. The formless, waffling Obama health insurance proposal is being shattered by the Republican cluster of Limbaugh-driven lies and the Blue Dog renegades in the Democratic Party, who are busy cashing mounds of campaign checks from the so-called health business. By ignoring and excluding the majority-supported single payer approach, the White House stifles any kind of insurance reform worthy of the name.
 
Publicized lies are translating into fears among people who should be supporting full medicare for all. FactCheck.org reports that “a notorious analysis of the House health care bill contains 48 claims. Twenty-six of them are false, and the rest are mostly misleading. Only four are true. For example, false are claims that the bill includes an order for end-of-life plans or health care for illegal aliens or assertions that ‘your health care will be rationed.’”
 
So wild are the falsehoods, fueled by runaway internet traffic, that the Republican National Committee implied in a fundraising letter that Democrats may structure the overhaul in a way to deny medical treatment to Republicans!
 
As with war, truth is the first casualty when it comes to the health care debate. The Democratically-controlled Congress, on its return after Labor Day, needs a wide-ranging personal, evidence-based series of public House and Senate hearings to again publicize the compelling story of avoidable suffering, fraud, waste, egregious profiteering and top executive self-enrichment – all subsidized by taxpayers.
 
Take the enormous and shocking information researched by Harvard Professor Malcolm Sparrow—an applied mathematician whose knowledge of health care billing schemes and regulatory deficiencies is without peer.
 
Mr. Sparrow is no arm-chair commentator. He has dug deeply into the enormously comprehensive frauds on medicare and consumers. He has found payments for medical services ordered by deceased doctors or huge payments in treatments for deceased patients—many gone for years.
 
Highlighting the widespread fraud on medicare by criminal behavior, he argues that these actions should be treated as “a crime problem” not just a “claims-processing problem.” Without criminal prosecutions, there is no deterrent stopping this massive robbery.
 
How massive? Read these words in recent testimony by Professor Sparrow:
 
    The units of measure for losses due to health care fraud and abuse in this country are hundreds of billions of dollars per year. We just don’t know the first digit. It might be as low as one hundred billion. More likely two or three. Possibly four or five. But whatever that first digit is, it has eleven zeroes after it. These are staggering sums of money to waste, and the task of controlling and reducing these losses warrants a great deal of serious attention.
 
 
 
In the early 1990s, the Congressional Government Accounting Office estimated that billing fraud accounts for 10% of health care spending annually. That would be about $250 billion this year. In 1993, Attorney General Janet Reno declared that health care fraud was the number two crime problem, after violent crime in the country.
 
With someone as carefully authoritative as Malcolm Sparrow, the Democrats can make this crime spree front and center during the health care debate. People want to be assured that their health insurance dollars are protected. Instead the “license to steal,” which is the title of Mr. Sparrow’s groundbreaking book, continues. And the Republicans continue to sidetrack priorities for action with seedy prevarications.
 
It is a remarkable commentary on the state of the White House and Congress that the Democrats appear befuddled in dealing with the kind of coarse, cruel, fear-mongering that an FDR and Lyndon Johnson would have overwhelmed and sent packing.
 
Meanwhile, join the “Care-A-Van” of roadtripping Oregon physicians and their efforts to bring the message of health care for all to Washington, DC.
 
August 24, 2009

The Obama White House—full of supposedly smart political advisors led by the President of the “Change You Can Believe In” campaign movement of 2008—is in disarray. Worse, multiple, confusing varieties of disarray provoking public confusion, internal Democratic Party strife, and the slow withdrawal of belief in Mr. Obama by his strongest supporters around the country.
   
Two of his most steadfast supporters in the media—columnists Paul Krugman and Bob Herbert of the New York Times are wondering about Mr. Obama’s plans. Krugman repeated his fellow Sunday Times essayist Frank Rich’s observation who wrote about Obama “punking” his supporters with his waffling, reversals and frequent astonishing adoption of Bush’s worst corporatist and military policies.
   
While Bob Herbert, taking to task his political hero for waffling and vagueness regarding health care, issued this reluctant appraisal:
   
“I hear almost daily from men and women who voted enthusiastically for Mr. Obama but are feeling disappointed. They feel that the banks made out like bandits in the bailouts, and that the health care initiative could become a boondoggle. Their biggest worry is that Mr. Obama is soft, that he is unwilling or incapable of fighting hard enough to counter the forces responsible for the sorry state the country is in.”
   
There has rarely been a more auspicious time for a transforming Presidential leadership. Disgraced corporate capitalism has shattered the economy. The living conditions of millions of workers and pensioners whose taxes were taken to bail out these Wall Street crooks and gamblers are dismal.
   
Rather than expressing remorse, the arrogant corporate lobbyists are working over Congress with ferocious demands, fueled by cash-register politics and paid Astroturf rallies back in the Congressional Districts.
   
The giant corporations and their trade lobbies want no real health insurance reform that will reduce their monopolies and profiteering. They want no renewable and energy efficient standards interfering with their massive waste, pollution and inefficiency. They want no reductions in the bloated military budget surrounded by the waste, fraud and abuse of what President Eisenhower called the “military-industrial complex” in his farewell warning to the American people.
   
The corporate supremacists want no changes in the deliberately complex and obscure tax laws favoring the corporate evaders and avoiders and the tax havens for the super-wealthy.
   
In short, the global corporations want Washington, D.C.; to continue being their massive deregulator and cash cow perpetuating the abandoning of American workers, the pillaging of the American taxpayer and the defrauding of the American consumer.
   
Forget about corporate law and order to restrain the corporate crime wave. The harmony, bipartisan President Obama and his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, have outsmarted themselves. What worked to defeat Hillary Clinton last year has succeeded in splitting the Congressional Democrats into progressives, corporate liberals and Blue Dog Conservatives Republicans can scarcely believe their luck and are busy exploiting these schisms.
   
Rep. Steny Hoyer, the number two House Democrat, undermines his Speaker, Nancy Pelosi’s “public option” plan for health insurance. Senator Max Baucus—a closet Republican masquerading as the Democratic Chair of the Senate Finance Committee, is working hand-in-glove with right-wing Republicans and the White House to craft a weak “bi-partisan” bill that keeps getting weaker as the corporatist Republicans sniff increasing weakness in the White House.
   
Meanwhile, in the House of Representatives, the more progressive legislators are accusing their former colleague, Committee Chair, Henry Waxman of selling out to the defiant Blue Dog Democrats on his Committee. While Mr. Waxman himself has to be worried that even his compromised “public option” (which Democrats should be calling “public choice”) will be derailed by the bill that the Baucus/Grassley/Obama axis will soon reveal in the Senate.
   
The Obama voters do not know what they are supposed to support. Obama never did identify with a clear health insurance proposal—not to mention the single payer approach (full Medicare for all) he says he would favor if he was “starting from scratch.”  There has been nothing upstanding for his supporters around the country to rally around.
   
It is sad to say that all this could have been predicted by Obama’s political record as an Illinois and U.S. Senator. He rarely has taken a stand and fought against his adversaries. Even after he cuts a deal with them, they continue to undermine his agenda.
   
Once again, Bob Herbert senses the disturbing trend: “More and more the president is being seen by his own supporters as someone who would like to please everybody, who is naïve about the prospects for bipartisanship, who believes that his strongest supporters will stay with him because they have nowhere else to go, and who will retreat whenever the Republicans and the corporate crowd come after him.”
   
Mr. Herbert can speak from authority. He has written many columns over the past 18 months reflecting that “nowhere else to go” attitude. If he is going off the bandwagon, more will follow. Mr. Obama better wake up and pay attention to his base before they either have somewhere else to go or simply stay home. It happened to Clinton in 1994.
 
 



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