When Barack Obama comes to town Thursday for the Michael Bennet fundraisathon, you’ll get the chance — if you have the dough — to see the new Obama.
Don’t worry, though, if you can’t make it. My guess is that the new Obama will look a lot like the old Obama, which, strangely, seems to be the point.
Here’s the bet Obama and the Democrats are making: Although Americans officially dislike virtually everyone in Washington — Scott Brown not having been there long enough to qualify — they seem to dislike Obama somewhat less.
The new strategy is not for Obama to make speeches about the need for bipartisanship or even to repeat his advice to Washington politicos that they turn off the cable-TV news for a few minutes and try, you know, listening to real people.
The Obama plan is to switch the channel from cable-TV news to his own political reality show, in which Obama is pitted against Republican opponents as the live cameras roll and you — the really real people — get to determine who survives.
Everything that happens now is simply a prelude to the Feb. 25 health care summit. That’s when Obama brings congressional leaders from both parties together for a half day of talk that presumably goes beyond talking points — a day in which arguments will get fleshed out and Republicans will have to go up directly against Obama, which is a little different than taking on, say, Harry Reid.
And everyone — by which I mean political junkies, pundits and the rest of the underemployed — will be watching. The point, of course, is not to persuade anyone in official Washington to change his or her mind. The Democrats had their 60 Senate votes, if you count Joe Lieberman, and promptly squandered them.
The point is for Obama to make the case to voters that filibuster-happy Republicans are being bull-headed and that weak-kneed Democrats are being weak-kneed. If Obama wants to pass health care, he must convince voters that his plan is in their best interest. We know Americans want health care reform in theory. They just don’t want it in 2,000 pages of fact.
It’s easy to demagogue a 2,000- page bill, even without resorting to death panels. But if Obama can make the case that politicians are standing in the way of progress — not to mention on the side of insurance companies (see: Anthem Blue Cross of California) — you can change the terms of the debate.
The health care argument is painfully simple to make. If you want to cover pre-existing conditions — as nearly everyone does — you have to have everyone insured or else no one gets insurance until it’s needed. And if everyone has to be insured, there must be subsidies to help those who can’t afford it. And if you want to pay for the subsidies, you have to find the money somewhere. Obama will gladly tell Republicans if they have a plan that can do all that, he’s happy to hear it.
It’s no wonder that Republicans, who continue to hedge about showing up, are nervous. And Democrats, meanwhile, are trying not to have a complete public breakdown.
Democrats are, of course, in your basic free fall. When Sen. Evan Bayh, a Democratic centrist who had a double-digit lead in the polls, says he won’t run for re-election, he doesn’t simply say he’s retiring. He also says how much he hates Congress. It’s the one thing everyone seems to agree on. In fact, it’s all there in the polling.
According to a CBS News/New York Times poll, only 8 percent think congressional incumbents should be re-elected. But the polling doesn’t end with Congress. You’ve seen Sarah Palin’s disastrous numbers. And Obama, meanwhile, is polling just under 50 percent.
That may be a distinct fall from grace — a fall distinct enough to make even Dick Cheney almost smile. And yet, Obama’s cratering numbers still leave him way ahead of Congress, ahead of Democrats, ahead of Republicans.
Running against Congress is a time-honored tradition, but there has rarely, if ever, been a better time than now. Congressional Republicans gave Obama his opening. They fell into a trap of their own making, deriding Democrats for a lack of transparency. They had a solid case to make — for which they could only thank Reid and Ben Nelson and gang — so long as no one ever called them on it.
But when Obama went to meet the House Republicans, he brought the cameras with him, and you saw what transparency can do. Let’s just say the Republicans only wished they had written notes on their hands.
Meanwhile, Obama is getting hit from the left for palling around with his “savvy” Wall Street friends, from the Cheney right for not torturing enough people and from everyone else for the Democrats losing Massachusetts, which is not unlike the French losing Paris.
But there’s one thing no one can criticize him for: He got out of Congress just in time. And, in the end, if he can’t take those guys on, he doesn’t have nearly as much game as he thinks.
Mike Littwin writes Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-5428 or mlittwin@denverpost.com.
