Legal Commentary

The Theory Of Change

By Big Tent Democrat

In the middle of primary fights, citizens, activists and bloggers like to think their guy or woman is different. They are going to change the way politics works. They are going to not disappoint. In short, they are not going to be pols. That is, in a word, idiotic. Yes, they are all pols. And they do what they do. - December 6, 2007

Lawrence Lessig:

Obama's victory was achieved because his team played the old game brilliantly. Staffed with the very best from the league of conventional politics, his team bought off PhRMA (with the promise not to use market forces to force market prices for prescription drugs), and the insurance industry (with the promise (and in this moment of celebration, let's ignore the duplicity in this) that they would face no new competition from a public option), so that by the end, as Greenwald puts it, the administration succeeded in "bribing and accommodating them to such an extreme degree that they ended up affirmatively supporting a bill that lavishes them with massive benefits." Obama didn't "push[] back on the undue influence of special interests," as he said today. He bought them off. And the price he paid should make us all wonder: how much reform can this administration -- and this Nation -- afford?

Lessig dreams of change he can believe in. It is a pipe dream:

[L]et us not forget: for a president overwhelmingly elected just a year ago, with a super majority in both the House and Senate, this has been a bizarrely difficult fight. This wasn't a third-string issue for Obama. It was the premier issue on the this President's agenda. And regardless of the foxmyths that spin with public opinion polls, it wasn't as if America didn't vote with a clear demand for health care reform. Yet the fight for this first major battle of this administration practically killed the administration, and this near death experience should finally waken this President from his conventional-politics stupor, and remind him of the reformer he originally was.

(Emphasis supplied.) Reformer he originally was? Lessig can write that even after this year? My gawd.

Speaking for me only

Full post as published by TalkLeft on March 23, 2010 (boomark / email).