President Barack Obama signs landmark health care legislation into law Tuesday, March 23. White House Photo, Pete Souza, 3/23/10

Les Payne

March 24, 2010

The president who campaigns with the big speech used 22 pens Tuesday in signing the historic health care bill that proved he can govern with the outreach as well as the arm twist.

Applying torque at the last minute to reluctant members of his own party, President Obama eclipsed the 216 House votes needed to sign into law what some call the most sweeping health overhaul since Medicare. The controversy became reality without a single GOP vote, and this after Obama exhausted all means to reason with the party—even trekking in January to the caves of the House Republicans' retreat in Maryland.    

Some have long considered Obama’s outreach to the GOP a fool’s errand; but it has now exposed the opposition party as foregoing all claims to common decency. Opting out of the etiquette of patriotism, the Republicans, not unlike Fox interviewer Bret Baier, flatly refuse to extend the minimum courtesies traditionally accorded Obama’s 43 predecessors to the office of the presidency.

It remains to be seen what Obama will make of this total rejection by the GOP; but his dramatic success with health care seems to have narrowed the gap with the progressive wing of his own party. Some Democrats were brought around with promises. Rep. Dennis Kucinich, the reluctant radical with no known, sell-out price, had to be walked to the precipice and made to peer over into the abyss.

The Ohio radical had declared on TV his resolute opposition to the health bill with no “public option.” Normally, under such conditions, this cold-eyed “Great Dissenter” with the concrete legs stays put. Opposing the previous House bill with 76 progressives, for example, Kucinich ended up as the last radical voting “no.”  

Last week the dissenting Kucinich was visited by President Obama who staged public rallies in Ohio and called out his name from the podium. It was not so much a salute as the president speaking over the congressman’s head to get constituents to put a bug in Kucinich’s ear. Ohioans didn’t mince words. Hedging his bets, Obama took Kucinich for a ride on Air Force One.

In the White House parlance, this is called the “treatment,” with President Lyndon B. Johnson considered the past master.

“Its tone.” wrote one LBJ biographer, “could be supplication, accusation, cajolery, exuberance, scorn, tears, complaint and the hint of a threat…[Johnson] moved in close, his face a scant millimeter from his target, his eyes widening and narrowing, his eyebrows rising and falling. ..the genius of analysis made The Treatment an almost hypnotic experience and rendered the target stunned and helpless.”

One cannot imagine President Obama executing the LBJ “treatment” as captured in the 1964 photograph of the president glowing down at Richard Russell, the racist U.S. Senator from Georgia.

Yet, after the Obama Treatment, Rep. Kucinich displayed all the tell-tale signs of a politician who had undergone “an almost hypnotic experience that rendered the target stunned and helpless.” We’ll have to wait for the biographer’s account to get the details, but it seems that Kucinich now knows how Sen. Russell must have felt.

“This is not the bill I wanted to support,” a seemingly dazed Kucinich said at his Wednesday press conference announcing that he had totally reversed his opposition to the health care proposal. The session with the president moved the staunch radical to square up with his kitchen cabinet consisting of close friends and his wife, Elizabeth.

“Something is better than nothing,” is the haunting refrain Kucinich said he got from constituents after Obama left town. “One can argue with that,” he said, making it clear that he does. There were also expressions of “a real desire for our president to succeed,” the congressman repeated. “If the [bill] fails it is damaging not only to him but to the country.”

This deep concern about country and the success of this president are precisely the boundaries that separate the radicals on the Left from the GOP on the Right.

Since LBJ pushed through the Voting and Civil Rights bills of the ‘60’s, the Republicans, starting under President Ronald Reagan, have hardened into a party of bigots in denial. They have abandoned the unifying pursuit of the broad national interest in favor of narrow, white-class privileges.

Nothing makes the party crazier than the ’08 election of the first African-American president—that the 55-percent, white voting majority was unable to defeat. No matter the content of Obama’s style or character, his mere presence in the White House drives GOP fears beyond reason and patriotism even.

Thus, unlike Kucinich, say, who could be appealed to on grounds of national interest or respect for the office of the presidency, the lock-stepping Republicans are beyond hope. They will cast not a single vote offering the slightest comfort to the Obama Administration—no matter the impact such an act would exert on the broad range of the American people.

“It’s a dangerous moment,” Kucinich said on Pacifica Radio. “There’s been such an effort to delegitimize [Obama’s] presidency right from the beginning that…standing at the sidelines is not an option right now…you have to maturely look at the situation as it is…and not lose total legitimacy by taking everything over a cliff.”

The GOP seems hell-bent on taking the republic over the very precipice President Bush left the nation careening toward when he retired to Texas. Kucinich was persuaded to take a deep breath—and act not upon his radical beliefs and private obsessions, or even tribal interests.

As a practitioner of the art of compromise, the duly-elected, Ohio progressive—deeply committed to single-payer, national insurance—decided to buy time by voting for the possible while continuing to work for what he considers the ideal.

In his new and unexpected maturity, Rep. Kucinich was also a winner fully deserving of one of those 22 ballpoint pens.