Will Afghanistan spell the end of health care reform?
Moving the goalpost during a policy debate is nothing new in Washington politics. If the game isn’t going your way, change the objective and you may change the story just enough to make a loss look a lot more like a win. Yet we may now be witnessing a game-modifier that is unique even by Washington standards – and capable of far reaching impact.
Pack up your Medicare cost bending charts, death panel debates and public option briefing papers. We’re moving this show to Afghanistan.
Rather than merely shifting the story on health care reform by tossing in a ‘lets kill granny’ grenade, the nation may be in the midst of a sudden and seismic re-ordering of political priorities where we find ourselves relocating to an entirely different stadium – a stadium half way around the world, with a field considerably more comfortable for the GOP and a game far easier for the public to follow.
For many in and out of Washington, the change may be arriving not a moment too soon. Let’s face it – few have ever really been able to make heads or tails out of the real issues involved in the health care debate.
Certainly, the Congressional Democrats have not scored any points on health care. The drive for legislation is about to reach its crescendo and Congressional Democrats still can’t agree on what their strategy should be in the effort to accomplish a victory. For that matter, they can’t even agree on what victory looks like.
President Obama has admitted that he has failed to ‘connect’ with the public on health care because the topic is just too complicated.
As for the Republicans in Congress, they have yet to formulate a health policy that goes beyond just saying no or using the debate as a tool to hobble the Obama administration.
So why not call a rain delay on health care and move on to a topic where the argument is far more comfortable for the politicians and the public?
Supporting an increase in troop strength in a foreign war designed to defeat terrorism is something Republicans everywhere can wrap their arms around. This is just the sort of issue that can carry the GOP into the 2010 mid-term elections looking tough and fighting the good fight on a subject they can feel good about.
It’s pretty much the same for Democrats who can appeal to their constituents with a much better understanding of where their voters stand on the issue of war.
From a political point of view, Afghanistan may simply be a much better way to go for both sides of the aisle.
If you’ve been watching TV talk/news over the past week, you could feel it coming. What began as the second or third item on the broadcast schedule quickly morphed into a larger story as America’s involvement in Afghanistan began to become a larger focus of national discussion. Still, something was needed to push Afghanistan to the front of the pack.
That shoe conveniently dropped on Monday when we awoke to a Washington Post piece, by Bob Woodward, wherein Woodward managed to print actual quotes from the memorandum written to the president by General Stanley McChrystal, the U.S. Commander in Afghanistan. The memo made the case, in great detail, for a significant troop increase.
The Afghanistan story had found its legs.
Making it all the ‘juicier’ was the realization that the McChrystal memo had been leaked to Woodward, starting the clock on one of the media’s favorite parlor games, “Who Will Out the Leaker?”
Understandably, the Republicans jumped on it. In an emailed statement delivered yesterday, Arizona Senator John McCain called for immediate hearings before the Senate Armed Services Committee.
I feel in the strongest possible terms that further delay in the decision to send the needed additional forces would endanger the lives of the 68,000 men and women currently serving in Afghanistan. The sooner a decision is made the sooner we can implement a strategy that will allow us to reverse the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan.
Last night, House Minority Leader, John Boehner, jumped into the fray suggesting, “The longer we wait, the more we put our troops at risk.”
What better way to shift the uncomfortable focus from the failing and confusing health care workings of the Senate Finance Committee over to the Senate Armed Services Committee where the issues seem so much easier to follow? This is the surge discussion all over again, and that is a conversation the GOP would like to have.
Then there is the public. While we have never been able to get comfortable with the complex language of the health care debate, terms like ‘nation building’ and ‘troop build-ups’ are concepts we understand. We’ve had experience with these words and have a far better sense of what we believe when it comes to a discussion about war.
As a result, talking points such as death panels, illegal immigrants and the creep of socialism now pale in comparison to the threat to health care reform posed by a national shift of attention to Afghanistan. While the other distractions were fabrications intended to mislead, Afghanistan is real and right up the collective American alley.
Struggling to hold off the Afghanistan discussion until he can achieve some sort of victory on health care, President Obama again finds himself caught between a rock and an even harder place. If the pressure on the president wasn’t already sufficiently crushing, the leak of the McCrystal memo has ratcheted up the heat considerably - presumably just what the leaker had in mind when he handed the document over to Woodward.
The rules of the health care debate have now changed. The reform issues that seemed so pressing last week may now fade into obscurity if yesterday’s fight for healthcare becomes tomorrow’s fight over Afghanistan.
All of this leaves me with one, pressing thought.
Our president just can’t catch a break.
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I seem to remember another liberal president who found himself in a Washington rat trap: Jimmy Carter.
If Obama is to survive he needs better, no tougher advisers and someone to drop the hammer on congress. As it stands now he is surviving on his popularity with the public and we all know the public has little sway in Washington.
Yeah, I’ve got experience watching defense contractor shills push “nation building” and “troop build-ups” all right, beginning in Vietnam. I had just hoped that Obama wasn’t going to play Lyndon Johnson, especially after the Bush-Cheney escapades.
The problem every thinking American should have with being in Afghanistan (and Iraq, too) is, why are we there? What’s the objective – to prop up another unpopular dictatorship? That worked well in North Vietnam.
You don’t have to pay for a troop build-up if you bring the troops home. Let these crooked SOBs in both countries defend themselves and duke it out with the Taliban, the Sunnis, the war lords, the chieftains, the Kurds and the con men. And when Al Qaeda comes out to play, use droids, bombs and missiles.
Yeah, yeah, I’ve heard it all before a thousand times, for years – the arguments about how can we abandon our friends in ____ (fill in the blank – name of country).
I prefer to look at it a different way. No. 1, we have no business engaging in a ground war in either place, and never have. No. 2, real American boys and girls are dying over there for no discernible reason, and it needs to stop. No. 3, we have spent $230 billion on making war in Afghanistan since 2001 and almost $690 billion on the Iraq war since 2003. Congress keeps voting for supplemental spending bills to hide the cost of war from the public, and they are preparing to do it again next year to the tune of $130 billion.
For that amount of money we could hang solar panels on every home in the United States, bomb the Pakistan-Afghan border into Swiss cheese and still make a major down payment on the deficit.
If the Republicans were really serious about national security, they’d quit picking on Mexican lawn-care workers and focus on the drug terrorists killing 20 people per day in all the Mexican border cities with guns they bought the day before in Texas and Arizona.
The president made 5 TV appearance on Sunday plus Letterman last night to discuss health care, I guess the president didn’t get the memo that the “goal post is being moved”. Unlike the GOP and many pundits this president is able to actually focus on more than one issue at time. Isn’t that exactly why we elected a policy wonk?
Unfortunately, those 5 appearances do not appear to have moved the needle based on the polls. However, I think his Letterman appearance might turn out to have been more valuable.
In response to another comment. See in context »I don’t think this calls the scene quite right. I don’t think the pressure on the health care bill is really letting up in Congress. I think what you may be seeing is a bit of a relaxing of the right-wing mania in opposition to the bill. With the volume going down a bit, it may seem like attention is focusing away from the issue. But I think it’s better to characterize this rather hopefully as the point in the meeting where the ridiculous ranting by the weirdos starts to ebb, and the people who want to get something accomplished get down to business.
I hope you’re right.
In response to another comment. See in context »Eick,
I really think your article is about the media, and not about the Administration. If the crazies stop making photo opportunities, the media is going to lose interest in presenting a very complex issue. Hopefully that means that the discussion will rise to the wonkish level it needs. In the meantime, wars always present drama and gripping pictures – the media will be on it like white on rice.
Obama can handle having more than one iron in the fire – if the klieg lights move on to another issue, it makes the case of reason that much stronger. You told us yourself that insurance issues put more lives at stake every year than we lost in our whole time in Iraq.
For the actual people of this country, insurance issues are not fading into obscurity.
the article is absolutely about the media — and Congress. It’s not about Obama. The media has much to say about the changing face of agenda. If you doubt this, have a look at the current state of the cap & bill trade, which is dying an ugly death because nobody is paying attention to it.
In response to another comment. See in context »Let me see if I have this straight. Forcing every American to buy health insurance is of the utmost importance, while the criminally stupid and pointless occupation of Afghanistan is a mere “distraction”? I think you have it backwards–the healthcare “debate” is the distraction from the much more urgent question of whether the US government should be dropping bombs on people halfway around the world for no reason whatsoever.