Fact is, Lincoln’s approach to abolition WAS almost EXACTLY like Obama’s timid approach to Health Care reform. He constantly bent over backwards to find a compromise plan that would be acceptable to slaveholders, without ever finding any takers. There were several “compensated emancipation” schemes and colonization schemes proposed by Lincoln – “bringing slaveholders to the table indeed” – and none of them went anywhere. And Lincoln in fact used language almost precisely like your supposed parody.

They weren’t stupid, the slaveholders, they chose to fight rather than let themselves be put on “the slow road to extinction”. Abolitionists tore their hair out about Lincoln’s temporizing.

And yet, somehow, he got it done. Eventually, under the cover of military necessity it got done.

Which is not to say that left criticism of Obama’s temporizing over health care is misplaced. Pressure on Obama from the left on health care is NECESSARY and I support Jane Hamsher’s effort here. But false comparison to a supposedly steadfast Lincoln are ridiculous. Henry Louis Gates has a new book about Lincoln. I strongly recommend you read it before you post more foolishness like this.

Have never understood why it is “single payer now or die,”

jane, it’s not.

it’s single payer or something, anything, else that makes sense. and a public option doesn’t make sense to everyone. there are very significant problems with the hypothetical / theoretical public-plan-in-a-multi-payer-system route that have never, to my knowledge, been addressed although they have been raised again and again (including by people like elizabeth warren’s collaborators, david himmelstein and steffie woolhandler).

i’d love to be persuaded that a public option won’t be a massive fail (and hated if there is a mandate). but so long as that is what i think (even while hoping there are grounds for your optimism and that i’m massively wrong), it seems to me important to keep talking about single payer. so, i’m happy to make phone calls in support of your whipping action but i also want to keep pointing out, yes in the comments, that a public option is not single payer, that having insurance isn’t the same as having access to healthcare, why i think the public option is the insurance industry compromise and single payer universal healthcare is the progressive policy that could work, etc. not because i think some congressional staffer is going to see it, but because i think ideas matter and i value the opportunity to discuss the issue with other concerned people here.

It’s the public option boosters like Obama, Sibelius, and HCAN national leadership, who denigrate single payer as too “disruptive” and swear on a stack of bibles that the public option will never, ever transition to single payer who I have issues with. I wouldn’t exactly say that I “piss” on them, but that’s partly a function of a prostate condition whose proper treatment my COBRA won’t cover.

Despite my strong doubts about the value of the exercise, I have nonetheless supported the CPC and am waiting to hear back from my congresswoman as part of your whip effort.

The snideness of your comment is symptomatic of the problematic, and I argue, ultimately nonstrategic, attitude adopted by increasingly tetchy public option advocates.

I’d volunteer, but

a. I’m not an expert, and
b. I have neither the skill nor the heart to Photoshop a Ronald McDonald wig onto miniralphbon.

We should be asking Senators to co-sponsor 898.

i second that.