Obama: Timing is everything

As the health care debate has roiled across the country in the past month, and especially since the August recess when organized right-wing, libertarian mobs tried to block the free speech rights of citizens at town halls, supporters of reform have been asking: Where’s Obama? Why isn’t he saying anything? Why is he letting them set the debate, define the terms of reform?

Why is he blowing this so badly?

In conversation with friends and others, I have made the point that, to me, seemed perfectly obvious: He was waiting for the right moment. I believe last night’s address to the joint chambers of Congress showed that I was correct in my assessment and that, more importantly, Obama was correct in his judgment to stand back from the fray as he did.

Consider it thus.

An enemy is approaching your town. At what point does the captain of the local militia order his forces to fire? The enemy not only has to be close enough to be hit, they have to be vulnerable to the counter-attack. As we all know from years of tv and movies, one of the best ploys is to let them believe they have a strategic advantage and, when they follow that bait, spring the trap.

Ok, as an analogy, that isn’t the greatest. My point is that Obama had one shot at this, one opportunity to hit one out of the park. Baseball fans know how rare the 9th inning walk-off grand slam is (or the last-second Hail Mary touchdown, or the ¾-court buzzer-beater). Suppose Obama, in response to the fears of reform supports had made a live national address in mid-August — with Congress three weeks away from returning to work on actual legislation? That’s three weeks for any good such an address would have done to be eviscerated by the media and enemy politicians during the gap between a speech and a resumption of Congress’ work.

Very bad timing. And that’s what I argued, to very little affirmative response. The glumness among progressives who are still to used to Clintonian failures and Daschlesque capitulations had grown so deep, they could not imagine that Obama, despite his track record, actually knew what he was doing by holding back.

And very clearly, he did.

The speech was indeed that grand slam, albeit 8th inning and not the walk-off. But grand it was, and on many levels. As much as anything, the speech justified and validated the President’s decision to wait as long as he did before speaking. Throughout the speech, he referred to the timeliness of the moment, of the need to act now:

I am not the first president to take up this cause, but I am determined to be the last. It has now been nearly a century since Theodore Roosevelt first called for health care reform.

Our collective failure to meet this challenge — year after year, decade after decade — has led us to a breaking point.

Well the time for bickering is over. The time for games has passed. Now is the season for action. Now is when we must bring the best ideas of both parties together, and show the American people that we can still do what we were sent here to do. Now is the time to deliver on health care.

Everyone in this room knows [that] if we do nothing … [m]ore Americans … will die.

I understand that the politically safe move would be to kick the can further down the road — to defer reform one more year, or one more election, or one more term. But that's not what the moment calls for. That's not what we came here to do. We did not come to fear the future. We came here to shape it.

The President moved from the sad fact of failure to meet the challenge of the moment to the desire of some to avoid the moment to his own determination to meet that the moment head-on: We did not come to fear the future. We came here to shape it.

As a volunteer with Organizing for America, the continuation of the Obama electoral campaign now working to support his change agenda, beginning with health care reform, I heard nothing new as he detailed the three points of his plan. What he detailed for the American people last night was the same three points volunteers have been bringing to their neighbors’ doors and to house parties across the country for nearly two months now:

1. Free choice: you go to the doctor you want, under the plan you want

2. Costs will be reduced

3. Quality, affordable health care for all citizens

That is the pledge we ask people to support at OFA, and that’s what Pres Obama reiterated last night. It was, of course, the first time most Americans would have heard the three simple points — and the polls that followed indicate that it’s a plan easy to understand and easy to support. My own experience on the doorstep sharing this plan with others — in SE Portland and in Salem — is that Americans do support the plan unless they are simply opposed to anything Obama and the Democrats are doing. People are desperate for their government to fix health care, and the President’s three simply fundamentals are exactly what they are looking for: choice, affordability and quality care.

I believe the President’s timing was excellent. Was this his plan all along? More or less, I think so. I doubt he foresaw the town hall hysteria anymore than he foresaw Rev Wright’s contribution last year. And although last night’s address was not the historic moment his speech in Philadelphia was, in the history of health care reform, it came very close. If the speech leads to a reform bill that not only includes his three fundamentals, intact and relatively free of the usual watering-down, and if it includes the strong public option for which he said will be made available to those who need it, then the speech will come to be seen as one of the defining moments of his presidency.

I am hoping that those who supported Obama last year and who work so hard and yearn so hard, so deeply for change — for the kind of America that he was referring to when he spoke of those who created Medicare and of Ted Kennedy — I hope that at last they understand that in Barack Obama (and David Axelrod, of course) they have a leader who may very well be the smartest guy in the room. Picking the right moment to use his one big opportunity on an issue is difficult. Too soon, and whatever points he makes die in the wasteland between speech and action. Too late, and, well, it’s too late.

Obama picked the right moment, and, unsurprisingly (why are we always surprised? he has yet to fall short in those Special Moments), he picked the right words. Speaking of Kennedy and the need for government to act:

That large heartedness — that concern and regard for the plight of others — is not a partisan feeling. It is not a Republican or a Democratic feeling. It, too, is part of the American character.

In other words, those who oppose health care reform lack a true American character. But he set this standard in non-partisan terms, and he made the accusation at no specific person or group. He simply said, be a good American, a true American, and make real reform happen. “The danger of too much government is matched by the perils of too little”, he said, advocating for “the leavening hand of wise policy” to protect both markets and vulnerable citizens.

Recognizing and using the fact that many Americans support existing government-run health care plans — Medicare, Medicaid, VA — he spoke of the wisdom and courage of those who refused to make politically safe choices and did the right thing for the American people. And of those previous political leaders who made those difficult choices, he said:

And they knew that when any government measure, no matter how carefully crafted or beneficial, is subject to scorn; when any efforts to help people in need are attacked as un-American; when facts and reason are thrown overboard and only timidity passes for wisdom; and we can no longer even engage in a civil conversation with each other over the things that truly matter — that at that point we don't merely lose our capacity to solve big challenges. We lose something essential about ourselves.

Health care reform is not a policy issue; it is a moral issue. Reform advocates have been making that point all year (as opposed to those opposing reform who speak of markets, costs and fear). But the discussion about reform is, Obama said, a moral issue in and of itself. Attacking the government for doing its job — regulating those who prove incapable of self-control, protecting the vulnerable, providing leadership in controversial matters — demeans the American character. The loss of “civil conversation” is a loss of the American character.

Few things matter more to Americans than the character. Freedom is part of that character, as the President noted, but so is the ability and willingness to empathize with and help others. In meeting the challenge of the moment with bold action, and in doing so in a civil manner, Americans not only solve a critical policy issue, they redeem their character, make themselves a better people.

Last night, it appears, was the right time to make that statement. I think so. It’s up to Congress to move on the moment, boldly and quickly. And it’s time for the American people to make sure their elected officials do exactly that.