By Steven Jonas, MD, MPH – October 27, 2011
For this issue of TPJmagazine, I am revisiting a column that
I published in this space a little over two years ago. Mainly historical, it still seems to be
apt. I do hope that you will
agree.
Entering the White House on January 20, 1976, Jimmy Carter was
in the post-Watergate, post-Viet Nam flush of Democratic victory. For the 1976 Presidential election, had
it not been for Chappaquiddick, Sen. Ted Kennedy would likely have been the Democratic
Party’s nominee (if he had not already been such in 1972).
If it had not been for his bladder cancer, Sen. Hubert
Humphrey might well have overtaken Carter in the later primaries. But Kennedy had Chappaquiddick and
Humphrey had cancer and the Democrats had no one but a highly inexperienced,
very nice, one-term governor of Georgia. Nevertheless, the Democrats were riding high. The Nixon dragon had finally been
slain. The foreign policy front
was relatively quiet, funnily enough due in major part to Nixon. Kissinger’s détente with the Soviet
Union was in place. Nixon/Kissinger had opened the door to China. Israel had conquered huge territories in the Six-Day and Yom
Kippur Wars, but had not yet begun their policy of gradual annexation of the
West Bank.
On the domestic side, again funnily enough, Nixon had
actually instituted several very important environmental programs. If it had not been for Watergate, he would
very likely have gained the passage of the fairly strong national health
insurance program that he had introduced to Congress in the spring of 1973, by
none other than Sen. Bob Dole. In
this context, Carter was in a position to focus on domestic policy, actually
building further on Nixon initiatives in that realm. As a matter of fact I heard Carter, in a speech to the 1976
Annual Meeting of the American Public Health Association, pledge that he would introduce
and win passage of a national health insurance program.
Well, Carter never quite got round to doing that. Nor, with the top of his staff drawn mainly
from his Georgia Governor’s office (!!), did he do much else. Jimmy Carter is remembered for two
things: the Camp David Accords and the Tehran Hostage Crisis. Why? Primarily because, unlike Republicans when they are in
office, Carter chose to try to work with the other side, even though he had
majorities in both Houses of Congress. On the domestic side, Nixon’s positive initiatives or no, the GOP was
able to bog down any major actions that Carter wanted to undertake. The Goldwater-Reagan right-wing of the
party was moving into various positions of power both inside and outside of Washington. Carter did not get along well with the
Kennedy/McGovern liberal wing of his own party and was never able to put
together a team to get Democratic things done. Furthermore, he was saddled with the inflationary spiral
that had begun under Nixon-Ford but which soon came to bear his name. He was able to pull off the Camp David
Accords because for different reasons both Israel and Egypt needed to quiet things
down. And then came the Hostage
Crisis.
Why did that happen? Simple. Carter did not know
who his friends were and who his enemies were. On the second most important foreign policy decision of his Presidency,
he listened to Republicans, to whom he did not have to listen, with disastrous
results. There was a pro-western,
secular overthrow of the Shah in 1978. There was a strong Islamist movement lead by the Ayatollah Khomeini, but
it was by no means a sure thing that it would eventually take power. The Shah went into exile in 1979, ill
with cancer. Kissinger and David
Rockefeller, among other top Republicans, pleaded with Carter to admit the Shah
to the US for treatment. The US
Embassy in Tehran very strongly warned him against doing that, predicting
several different very negative outcomes, including something like the one that
actually happened. Carter gave in to
the Republicans and the outcomes of the resultant Islamist takeover have reverberated
negatively both for the Iranian people and of ourselves down to this very
day. He was a one-termer, who gave
us Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.
The Clinton Presidency was a one-termer in functional terms. The Republicans made sure of that from
the git-go, from Gennifer Flowers (of whom they never let go) to White Water to
the White House Travel Office and on and on, with a very well-funded “get
Clinton” campaign. (Yes, there was
indeed a “vast right-wing conspiracy,” lead by Richard Mellon Scaife.) Clinton’s biggest problem, before Monica
Lewinsky, was that he was not a fighter. In fact, he was the classic child of two alcoholic parents: he wanted to
please everybody, but especially his enemies. On the health care reform debate I happened to have had the
opportunity, as a “Designated Speaker for the Clinton Health Plan,” to have
seen this somewhat from the inside.
He did not fight. Either he did not know what the GOP was out to do or he did not know how
to deal with them. Bill Kristol
sent around a memo in December, 1993 saying that the GOP must defeat the
Clinton Health Plan (CHP), for political reasons (I’ve got a copy in my files. Kristol did the same thing on the Obama
initiative). Clinton did not use
this memo against his opposition. Bob Dole led the charge against the CHP in the Senate, which had major
features in common with the Nixon Health Plan. Funny, but with an excellent
speech about everything that was wrong with the US health care system in 1973
(I’ve got a copy of excerpts of that speech in my files too) it was none other
than then Republican Minority Leader Bob Dole who had introduced the Nixon
Health Plan to the Senate. Clinton
did not use the Dole speech either. He sat there and let Dick Morris (he who had formerly worked for Sen.
Trent Lott and now is a right-wing shill, one must wonder why Clinton ever
hired him) lead him into “triangulation,” of use primarily against the Democrats
in the Congress, and lost the health care reform battle.
Then came Monica Lewinsky and the Paula Jones perjury trap
that was neatly laid by Ken Starr who illegally fed the Lewinsky information to
Jones’ legal team, leading to impeachment and the complete crippling of
Clinton’s second term. Of course,
given the Lewinsky scandal alone, that happened might have happened
anyway. But it might well have
turned out differently had Clinton been a Republican-fighter instead of a Republican-compromiser
from the git-go. After all, the
Lewinsky episode and the subsequent impeachment trial was about sex between
consenting adults, not quite on the level of cheating one’s way into the Air
National Guard or lying the nation into war. But that’s another story.
Which leads us to President Obama. The original version of this column was written about a week
in advance of his speech to the Congress on health care scheduled for September
9, 2009. Perhaps, I said back
then, “he will surprise us.” But President
Obama, like his two Democratic immediate predecessors in the White House, seems
not to know who his enemies are. He seems not realize that the GOP has been out to get him since the
Electoral College voted in December, 2008, if not before. Mitch McConnell made that very clear
back then, when he said that he would filibuster “any bill I don’t like.” They were not interested in “bi-partisanship”
back then, and they sure aren’t interested in it now. They were then a minority party in both Houses and still are
in the Senate, although through the liberal use of the filibuster they have
controlled that House for most of the Obama Presidency. They know that their only way back to
power is to wage war, not on the objective elements of the issues, but on the
person and with every Big Lie they can dream up. In December 2010, with candor
remarkable for a Republican, McConnell announced that his number one goal in
the then upcoming Congress was to ensure the defeat of Obama in 2012. As is well-known, that they are now doing
this to a fare-thee-well. As is
well-known, it seems, to everyone except the President and his staff (that is
possibly until very, very recently. We shall have to watch Obama with care to see if he backs up with recent
rhetoric with actions. He has done
too little of the latter previously.)
A strategic decision was made by the Obama White House to
try to “bring the country together.” Well, from Rush Limbaugh’s “I hope he fails” statement
onwards, it has been clear that to do their very best to make sure that that
happens is the central element of the GOP strategy. But the President persists. For example, as of the original writing of this column (Sept.
4, 2009), he was said to have been negotiating with Sen. Olympia Snow (!) for
some kind of “compromise” on health care reform, that would put off the
absolutely essential public option to some indeterminate date. That is a Republican policy that is a recipe
for failure for any health care reform package. And now they have announced as a number one goal were they
to win the presidency the repeal of
a “reform” package that is indeed not much more than a major Federal subsidy
for the private health insurance companies.
But beyond that, combined with buying into Republican recipe
for the totally unwinnable (no matter which way you want to define it) Afghan
War, President Obama has been quickly paving the road down which he may well travel
to being the third one-term Democratic President in a row. Since the Goldwater-Reagan takeover of
their party, the Republicans have known, most of the time, how to win: stay
Republican, build on their base, cheat and lie a lot. It’s not too late for Obama to learn. He is a very smart man. In dealing with the modern Republican
Party he needs to learn just one thing: the modern GOP is the enemy. Hugh Scott, Jacob Javits, and John Chafee are no longer in the
Senate. This bunch cannot be dealt
with honestly.
All the President needs to do is, not lie, cheat, and
encourage violence, but rather follow the truly Democratic policies that he
actually won the election on. He
needs to become a real Democratic President doing battle with a real Party of
Right-Wing Reaction. Presidents
Carter and Clinton have spent their post-Presidential years doing great
charitable works both at home and abroad. If President Obama doesn’t wake up to reality, instead of organizing his
natural base to support him in full throat and finally turning his back on the
disastrous policies and politics of the Democratic Leadership Council now
hiding under such mis-leading names as “No Labels” and “The Third Way,” he can
always go back teaching constitutional law, instead of putting it into practice
against the enemies of Constitutional government, like a certain former
Vice-President and every announced candidate for the GOTP Presidential
nomination.
As my readers at BuzzFlash@Truthout and related webmagazines
know, I don’t think that there is much of a chance that this will happen. But hey, you never know.