THE
IDEALISTS
hoped,” said Rashad Robinson,
who runs the civil rights group
ColorOfChange. “Presidents of the
United States are not activists.”
Obama was a community organizer once, “but that was years
and years ago,” Robinson said. To
the kind of people who run for
elected office and win, compromise is not a dirty word.
And yet Robinson is adamant
that on health care, Obama was
too quick to give up. “It felt like
we compromised too early,” he
said. More energy on the left might
have strengthened Obama’s bargaining position, Robinson said, and
led to better deals with Congress.
But the White House had stifled
its left flank. At an August 2009
strategy session, for instance, thenWhite House Chief of Staff Rahm
Emanuel famously called liberal
groups who wanted to pressure
conservative Democrats to support
Obama’s bill “fucking retarded.”
What infuriated Faux the most,
he said, was “the savage way that
the White House went after singlepayer people.” Single-payer advocates favored a single insurance
pool run by the government, instead of forcing people to buy insurance from private companies. That
idea was deeply unpopular with Re-
HUFFINGTON
11.04.12
publicans, conservative Democrats
and insurance companies.
“OK, I can understand Barack
Obama sitting in the White House
and saying we’ll never get singlepayer through,” Faux said. “But
the White House went after them!
They were not allowed to testify.
They were completely shut off.”
“You need somebody on your
extreme in order to get a reasonable compromise,” he said. “The
“YOU’VE GOT TO BE ON
THE RIGHT SIDE OF THIS,
AND THEY WERE ON THE
WRONG SIDE. THE SHIT
HIT THE FAN.”
Republicans understand that.
They let their crazies go wild.”
For Bhargava, the low point of
Obama’s first term came in a meeting in December 2009 that included Summers and Geithner, in
which progressive groups made the
argument for a second stimulus.
By then it had become increasingly
clear that the first $800 billion
stimulus — a good chunk of which
had gone into anti-poverty programs — wasn’t going to be enough
to fully revive the economy and
bring unemployment to anywhere