A Troubled America

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Earlier this summer, I travelled through eight American states, entering the United States at Detroit in Michigan and leaving at Calais, Maine.

The trip included longer stops in Columbus and Boston.

From what I observed, Americans seemed more politically polarized than ever. Many on the right of the political spectrum condemned everything President Barack Obama stood for, and indeed some questioned his very legitimacy as America’s chief executive.

The radio and television programs, and the newspaper columns, were full of anti-Obama tirades, attacking his efforts to bring some measure of sanity to the country’s private, expensive, and inadequate health-care system, one where insurance premiums have risen three times faster than wages in recent years.

Overhauling the $2.5 trillion U.S. health care system, by cutting costs and expanding coverage to the estimated 46 million Americans without health insurance, has been Obama’s top domestic initiative.

Yet the way some Republicans attacked the “socialist” attempts by “big government in Washington” to introduce a medical system that would serve the many millions of uninsured Americans, including not just the poor but those in the middle class who have recently lost their jobs, someone arriving from another planet would assume that the current federal government was a regime imposed by a foreign power, not one Americans had voted for just last November.

Backed by the private insurance companies, a massive propaganda campaign has been unleashed against Obama’s reform proposals. Boisterous “town hall” meetings held across the country over the summer turned into shouting matches. The onslaught of attacks have taken their toll on his popularity.

Opponents claimed that, with cost-conscious bureaucrats in control, medical treatments for the elderly would be curtailed by “death squads,” which would result in doctors “pulling the plug on grannny!” Some pro-life groups also objected to abortion becoming a publically-funded program. (Actually, under Obama’s plan, no federal dollars would be used to fund abortions.)

Clearly, this propaganda has been effective. Though the Democrats control both the presidency and both houses of Congress, they have been backpedaling in recent weeks.

Senate Democrats support some insurance reforms, such as protecting those with pre-existing medical conditions and preventing insurance companies from capping coverage. But many of their plans do not include the so-called “public option” – a government-run health insurance option to compete with private companies – that health care advocates insist is critical for reform to be effective.

In an address to Congress on Sept. 8, Obama tried to regain the initiative.“Our collective failure to meet this challenge – year after year, decade after decade – has led us to a breaking point,” he stated.

I have in the past criticized Canada’s own medical system, but compared to the situation in the U.S., it is something in which we can take pride.

Finally, there are extremists who deny Obama’s very right to sit in the White House. These “birthers,” as they call themselves, insist that Obama was born in Kenya, rather than in Hawaii, and is thus not even eligible to be president, since the U.S. Constitution requires that the occupant of the office be “a natural born citizen” of the United States.

Others conspiracy theorists assert that he is secretly a Muslim who has set out to ruin the country. (I heard this opinion expressed in a small town in Ohio.)

Much of this relates, of course, to the fact that Obama is an African American and hence, to such people, simply unacceptable as president.

The vicious tone of the backlash against the administration is troubling. It implies an ideological rejection of the democratic process through which Obama received a mandate to govern the country. These are clearly not easy times for Americans.