Death Wish Politics

As horrific and demoralizing as the announcement of the Afghanstan escalation is going to be today, don't let it distract you from the White House's continuing effort to ensure health care DEform enriches health insurance giants at the expense of working Americans.

Mike Lux at Open Left:

The way some Democrats want to respond to numbers like these is pure and simple death wish politics. It's the bizarre inside-the-Beltway centrism that cares more about what corporate lobbyists and CBO scoring than about what anyone who might actually vote thinks: don't do anything too tough to Wall Street, don't create jobs because it will add to the deficit, don't put anything into health care reform that voters might actually notice for the next five years, and be "fair" to the poor insurance companies.

The quote of the day that has me gnashing my teeth:

White House health reform czar Nancy-Ann DeParle said the president was moving as quickly as possible. She said that the insurance industry cannot be forced to accept people irrespective of preexisting conditions until everyone is required to have insurance, and that the administration does not want such a requirement until the exchanges are up and running.

Insurance companies have been making enormous profits for decades now by hiking prices through the roof and denying care to sick people, and we are going to worry about being fair to them in the transition to a better health care system? When we are going to mandate that people buy insurance, and subsidize them to do so, after the new system is in place? C'mon now. If the insurance companies have to reduce their profit margins for a few years, I don't think we should be shedding any tears for them.

Democrats have to figure out how to produce real benefits for real people now, not in some future years from now. A new poll out from Democracy Corps nails it: rather than bragging about the signs of progress in the economy when voters don't feel them yet, Democrats need to focus with urgency on jobs, and other tangible benefits voters can see and feel. Trickle-down economics (first get the banks healthy, then eventually everyone will get jobs) and health care reform with benefits kicking in for people in 2014 will make the 2010 elections ugly.

It's time to kill off death wish politics in the Democratic Party.

Digby adds:

I just can't believe it. All along I had been assuming that the one thing everyone agreed upon was that the rescission and denial of insurance based on pre-existing conditions were the things that the Democrats would have to point to as the immediate benefit of all this sturm and drangover health care this year. It's unfathomable to me that they have decided not to do that.

I guess they think they can just babble a bunch of happy talk and nobody will notice that nothing's going to change for anyone for years even as the Republicans demagogue it on a daily basis. What kind of lunacy is that?

I've called this fucking-over-the-base phenomenon "playing prevent defense" and "snatching defeat from the jaws of victory", but Lux nails it with "Death Wish Politics."