The Rabbit Ragu Democrats

Frank Rich
Op-Ed Columnist
The New York Times
October 4, 2009


IN the annals of American excess, there often arrives a moment when those with too much money, too much clout and too much hubris just can’t stop themselves from tempting the fates. They throw an over-the-top party in public, or parade their wealth and power before the press, and the next thing you know their world, and sometimes ours, has crashed.


In the go-go Reagan 1980s, the junk bond king Michael Milken bedazzled investors with lavish Predators’ Balls in Beverly Hills. Sure enough, he and Wall Street would end the decade in ruin. Back East, the financier Saul Steinberg celebrated his 50th birthday in 1989 with a $1 million party in the Hamptons. “Honey, if this moment were a stock, I’d short it,” he said when toasting his wife. He would soon suffer a stroke and see his company go bankrupt.

Steinberg sold his vast New York apartment to the private equity titan Stephen Schwarzman. In February 2007, Schwarzman marked his 60th birthday with a highly visible multimillion-dollar bacchanal in the Park Avenue Armory. Though Schwarzman hasn’t suffered much since — he is tied for 50th on the new Forbes list of the 400 wealthiest Americans — his bash presaged the bust to come. He became, as James Stewart wrote in The New Yorker, “the designated villain of an era on Wall Street — an era of rapacious capitalists and heedless self-indulgence.”

It’s in this context that you have to wonder what some of the Obama era’s most moneyed and White House-connected lobbyists were thinking as they preened before a Washington Post reporter recently for two lengthy articles. We’re not even nine months into the new administration, yet these swaggering, utterly un-self-aware influence peddlers seem determined to prove that nothing except the party affiliations has changed in the Beltway’s pay-for-play culture since Tom DeLay. If these lobbyists were stocks, I’d short them.

One of the articles focused on Heather Podesta — “The It Girl of a New Generation of Lobbyists” — who lobbies for health care players like Eli Lilly, HealthSouth and Cigna. Podesta is half of what The Post has called a “mega-lobbying” couple. Her husband, with his own separate (and larger) lobbying shop, is Tony Podesta, the brother of John Podesta, the Clinton White House chief of staff who ran the Obama transition. Back in November, Tony Podesta told The Times that only “very unsophisticated” clients would hire his firm because of his brother’s role in assembling the new administration. That encyclopedic andever-expanding list of “unsophisticated” clients includes Amgen and the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity — and that’s just among the A’s. His business was up 57 percent from last year in the first six months of 2009. Heather Podesta’s was up 65 percent.

When we first meet Heather Podesta in The Post, she is being bussed on the cheek by Charles Rangel at his August birthday party at New York’s Tavern on the Green. In keeping with the usual pattern of blowback, it took only one day after the article appeared for The Times to report that Rangel, the ethically challenged chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, was guilty of yet another lapse: He’d neglected to list at least $500,000 in assets on his 2007 Congressional disclosure form. As if that were not karmic retribution enough, Tavern on the Green filed for bankruptcy just days after that.

The second Post article, on the front page two weeks ago, described the scene, as well as the rabbit ragu, at Ristorante Tosca, the lobbyists’ hangout on F Street in downtown Washington. The Post did not mention that it is just four blocks away from the location ofthe now defunct Signatures, the restaurant whose owner, Jack Abramoff, was the go-to fixer of the DeLay “K Street project” before scandal brought him down.

The stars of Tosca’s “Power Section,” we learned, include the Podestas, Tom Daschle (“not technically a registered lobbyist” but, as The Post put it, “a ‘special policy adviser’ — wink wink”) and Steve Elmendorf (who “eats lunch out only at Tosca”). Elmendorf was chief of staff to the former Democratic House leader Dick Gephardt. A quick visit to opensecrets.org reveals that Elmendorf Strategies’ client list includes Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, among other players in the coming battle over financial regulation reform. Then again, as The Nation details in its current issue, Gephardt has also lobbied for Goldman, among many other corporate clients in opposition to the populist policies he once championed.

Barack Obama promised a change from this revolving-door, behind-closed-doors collaboration between special interests and government. He vowed to “do our business in the light of day” — with health care negotiations broadcast on C-Span — and to “restore the vital trust between people and their government.” He said, “I intend to tell the corporate lobbyists that their days of setting the agenda in Washington are over.” That those lobbyists would so extravagantly flaunt their undiminished role shows just how little they believe that a new sheriff has arrived in Dodge.

In his scathing Wall Street Journal column on The Post articles last week, Thomas Frank crystallized the gap between Obama’s pledge and this reality. “There is something uniquely depressing about the fact that the National Portrait Gallery’s version of the Barack Obama ‘Hope’ poster previously belonged to a pair of lobbyists.” That’s no joke: It was donated by Tony and Heather Podesta.

Obama’s promise to make Americans trust the government again was not just another campaign bullet point; it’s the foundation of his brand of governance and essential to his success in office. At the first anniversary of the TARP bailout of the banks, we can see how far he has to go. Americans’ continued suspicion that Washington is in cahoots with powerful interests in joints like Tosca is contributing to their confusion and skepticism about what’s happening out of view in the battle over health care reform.

The public is not wrong. The administration’s legislative deals with the pharmaceutical companies were made in back rooms. Business Week reported in early August that the UnitedHealth Group and its fellow insurance giants had already quietly rounded up moderate Democrats in the House to block any public health care option that would compete with them for business. UnitedHealth’s hired Beltway gunslingers include both Elmendorf Strategies and Daschle, a public supporter of the public option who nonetheless does some of his “wink, wink” counseling for UnitedHealth. The company’s in-house lobbyist is a former chief of staff to Steny Hoyer, the House majority leader. Gephardtconsults there too.

But it’s not as if the Republicans now have the public’s back. DeLay may be reduced these days to violating public taste rather than the public trust on “Dancing With the Stars,” but back on Capitol Hill, his successors keep the K Street faith. In their campaign to kill the public option, G.O.P. leaders often cite data from the Lewin Group, a research company, which has projected that 88 million Americans might quit their private insurance plans if given a government alternative. (The Congressional Budget Office puts the figure at the far less earthshaking 10 to 11 million.) Lewin, which repeatedly insists it’s still a nonpartisan outfit, was actually bought by a subsidiary of UnitedHealth in 2007. The Huffington Post reported in August that John Boehner and Eric Cantor — who use Lewin’s findings to scare voters about a “government takeover” of health care — are big recipients of UnitedHealth campaign cash.

Next up will be the overhaul of financial regulations. With job seekers now outnumbering job openings 6 to 1 in America, many still wonder why most of the big-dog culprits who helped speed the national meltdown — from lying and gambling bankers to shyster subprime mortgage packagers to executives at delinquent ratings agencies — have not shared their pain. In his speech marking the anniversary of Lehman Brothers’ failure, Obama chastised Wall Street for having taken irresponsible risks. But of course it is already back doing exactly that.

Meanwhile, we’re hearing of behind-the-scenes Congressional softening of perhaps the most promising component of the White House’s modest financial regulatory package, a Consumer Financial Protection Agency. Real-estate brokerages are being exempted from its purview, and banks will not be required to offer “plain vanilla” mortgages. As in health care, the question of what the White House will really fight for in financial reform remains open. While the ostentatious daily predators’ ball at Ristorante Tosca is a bad omen, we don’t know yet whether that omen is for the lobbyists, or the Obama administration, or both.

This is history that the president still has the power to write. It will be written in the bills he will or won’t sign into law. We can only hope that he learned an important lesson from his stunning failure to secure Olympic gold for his political home of Chicago last week. If the Olympic committee has the audacity to stand up to a lobbyist as powerful as the president of the United States, then surely the president of the United States can stand up to the powerful interests angling to defeat his promise of reform.

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

The Real Story Behind the “Rogue” in Sarah Palin’s New Book.

AK Mudflats
The Mubflats
September 28, 2009

“Going Rogue,” is the title of Sarah Palin’s soon-to-be released memoir. It’s cute, it’s catchy and it will sell some books. The 400-page tome will hit the shelves on November 17th, with a massive first printing of 1.5 million copies.  And each one of those book jackets is another jab at two of the many casualties of the Palin administration in Alaska.

Politico reports that the phrase has its roots in an Oct. 20 story by Slate’s John Dickerson, with the lead: “Has Sarah Palin “gone rogue”?”

But those of us who live in Alaska, and who have been following this story from the beginning know the real root of that phrase, and will understand the ugly irony of Palin’s title.

During the ethics investigation of Sarah Palin now known as “Troopergate,” that phrase became seared into the collective consciousness of Alaskans.  Palin’s spokeswoman Meghan Stapleton used that word referring not to Palin, but to the former Commissioner of Public Safety Walt Monegan.  Palin had pressured Monegan to fire her ex-brother in law Trooper Mike Wooten whose nasty divorce from Palin’s sister had left bitter feelings.  Monegan refused to fire him, and was subsequently dismissed by the governor, leaving the Department of Public Safety without leadership, and leaving many Alaskans with a bad taste in their mouths.

In a stinging press conference, Stapleton said that Monegan, a particularly well-liked and respected public servant, former police chief and ex-Marine had displayed “egregious rogue behavior.”  Stapleton, who had been a respected news anchor before her association with Palin, suffered withering criticism from Alaskans on both sides of the political spectrum.  Alaska is a small town. Monegan was no “rogue,” everyone knew it, and the use of the term disgraced her.

What had Monegan done, according to the governor, that earned him this brand?  He had planned a trip to Washington D.C. to seek funding to help combat sexual assault in a state that leads the nation in that category.  Rogue, indeed.

In September of 2008, Alaskans for Truth held a rally in downtown Anchorage.  More than 1500 Alaskans showed up to protest the administration’s handling of “Troopergate,” the insinuation of the McCain campaign’s attorneys into Alaska’s Department of Law,  and the outrageous behavior of Meg Stapleton, then Attorney General Talis Colberg, and Palin herself.  One of the speakers at the rally was Betty Monegan, the mother of Walt Monegan, who carried a sign referencing the outrageous accusations made by the Palin administration.

But Monegan was not the only one to stand accused of being a “rogue.”  Mike Wooten, the infamous ex-brother-in-law was called a “rogue trooper” and Palin said he was a danger to her family and to the public.  She made it clear that in no uncertain terms that being a “rogue” was not a good thing.   These accusations were soundly refuted by Steven Branchflower, an independent investigator hired by the bipartisan Legislative Council to investigate Troopergate.

“I conclude that such claims of fear were not bona fide and were offered to provide cover for the Palins’ real motivation: to get Trooper Wooten fired for personal family reasons,” Branchflower wrote.

The Branchflower report states Todd Palin used his wife’s office and its resources to press for Wooten’s removal, and the governor “failed to act” to stop it. But because Todd Palin is not a state employee, the report makes no finding regarding his conduct.

The bipartisan Legislative Council, which commissioned the investigation after Monegan was fired, unanimously adopted the 263-page public report…

The Branchflower Report was to find Governor Palin guilty of abusing her power as governor under the Alaska Executive Branch Ethics Act. Attorney General Talis Colberg would ultimately resign his position, and Todd Palin and several administration officials would be found guilty of contempt of the Legislature for ignoring subpoenas.

Trooper Mike Wooten ended up with a desk job because Palin’s accusations that he was a “rogue” and a danger to the public had brought about threats that made it impossible for him to work out in the open as a trooper, despite the findings of the Branchflower Report.

Walt Monegan was denied a request for a due process hearing before the governor-appointed Alaska Personnel Board to address reputational harm because of the insults he endured from an administration who chose to call him a “rogue.”  That’s the same board to which Palin filed a complaint against herself, and was subsequently cleared of wrongdoing.

And now Sarah Palin apparently hopes to make the term “rogue” impish and endearing, and hopes it will help her sell a lot of books.  But that term is no such thing to many Alaskans. It wasn’t “cute” when it was used as a finely sharpened tool in the Palin toolbox, used to malign the characters of those who stood in the way of her power scramble to become the Vice President of the United States.

She may have fooled her ghost writer, and the folks at Harper-Collins, and she may fool many of those in the Lower 48 who will wait on line for their copy of “Going Rogue,”  but she will not fool Alaskans.

Copyright 2009 The Mudflats

Once again, Americans are smarter than the media

 

Joan Walsh
salon.com
September 23, 2009

A slumping President Obama, battered in the polls and facing charges he's "overexposed" in the media, will get the blame if he doesn't pass healthcare reform this year. Or so goes an increasingly negative media narrative in the wake of a tough month for the new president.

But the most recent NBC/WSJ poll released Tuesday turns almost all of those assumptions on their head. Only a third of those polled said Obama is "overexposed" in the media -- 63 percent said his exposure was either just right or too little. Thirty-seven percent said congressional Republicans would be to blame if Obama's healthcare reform drive fails; only 10 percent would blame Obama. Almost 80 percent of Americans said they like the president personally, and his job approval has held steady over the last rocky month, at 51 percent.

Far from hurting the president or his agenda, this week's media blitz seems to have improved his numbers on healthcare, specifically. Last month, only 41 percent of Americans approved of the way he was handling the issue, while 47 percent disapproved; now it's 45 percent-46 percent. In particular, Obama has rallied Democrats behind his plan: Last month 62 percent  of Democrats backed Obama's plan; now 69 percent  do.

It's not all good news for Obama and those who support robust health insurance reform, including a public option. MSNBC's Ed Schultz pointed to a vexing paradox: While an impressive 73 percent of those polled say it's extremely important that the plan have a public option (only 23 percent say it's unimportant), 48 percent oppose the public option, while 46 percent support it. Go figure.

There's similar confusion about Obama's stimulus plan: 45 percent said it was a bad idea, with 34 percent supporting it, and yet on balance -- 46 percent to 43 percent -- they believe the recession would have been worse without it.

And a combination of confusion and dissent over Afghanistan seems to be pulling down Obama's approval rating on foreign policy issues: It's dropped from 57 percent to 50 percent since July.

Clearly the president still has a slog ahead of him as the competing versions of healthcare reform plans -- all crafted by Democrats, by the way -- make their way through Congress. But it's also clear that the Obama administration's best political asset is Obama, and the White House should continue to tune out Beltway doubters.

Meanwhile, though, the best news about healthcare reform came from Will Ferrell and MoveOn today: The left has a sense of humor, and this video spoofing the insurance industry's syrupy "We're on your side" ad campaign made me laugh out loud. (Jon Hamm's harried, sexy health insurance exec could make me turn against the public option.) Great work, MoveOn!

Copyright ©2009 Salon Media Group, Inc.

Even Glenn Beck Is Right Twice a Day

  

Frank Rich

Op Ed Columnist

The New York Times

September 19, 2009

IF only it were just about the color of his skin. With all due respect to Jimmy Carter, the racist component of Obama-hatred has been undeniable since the summer of 2008, when Sarah Palin rallied all-white mobs to the defense of the “real America.” Joe Wilson may or may not be in that camp, but, either way, that’s not the news. As we watched and rewatched the South Carolina congressman’s star turn, what grabbed us was the act itself.

What made the lone, piercing cry of “You lie!” shocking was that it breached a previously secure barrier. It was the first time that the violent rage surging in town-hall meetings all summer blasted into the same room as the president. Wilson’s televised shout was tantamount to yelling “Fire!” in a crowded theater. When he later explained that his behavior was “spontaneous” rather than premeditated, that was even more disturbing. It’s not good for the country that a lawmaker can’t control his anger at Barack Obama. It gives permission to crazy people.

The White House was right not to second Carter’s motion and cue another “national conversation about race.” No matter how many teachable moments we have, some people won’t be taught. (Though how satisfying it would have been for Obama to dismiss Wilson, like the boorish Kanye West, as a “jackass.”) But there is a national conversation we must have right now — the one about what, in addition to race, is driving this anger and what can be done about it. We are kidding ourselves if we think it’s only about bigotry, or health care, or even Obama. The growing minority that feels disenfranchised by Washington can’t be so easily ghettoized and dismissed.

Many of those Americans may hate Obama, but they don’t love the Republican establishment either. Michael Steele, who was declared persona non grata at one of the mad “tea parties” in April, was not invited to that right-wing 9/12 March on Washington last weekend. There were no public encomiums for McCain or Bush. No Senate leader spoke to the gathering, and perhaps only Palin and Ron Paul would have been welcome from the ranks of what passes for G.O.P. presidential timber. If there was a real hero to this crowd, it was the protest’s most prominent promoter, the radio and TV talker Glenn Beck.

Time put Beck on its cover this week. Man of the Year may not be far behind. Beck is not, as many liberals assume, merely the latest incarnation of Rush Limbaugh. He is something different. That’s why he is gaining on his antecedents — and gaining traction in the country’s angrier precincts.

Though Beck’s daily Fox News show is in the sleepy slot of 5 p.m., his ratings are increasingly neck and neck with the prime-time tag team of Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity, and he has beaten them in the prized 25-to-54 demographic. It’s not just because he is younger (45). This self-described “rodeo clown,” who wells up with tears for dramatic effect, doesn’t come across as cranky or pompous, like Limbaugh and O’Reilly. A fervent Mormon convert and proselytizer, he is untainted by association with the old Dobson-Robertson-Reed religious right. Unlike Limbaugh, he bonds with his fallible listeners by openly and repeatedly owning up to his own mistakes, including his history of drug and alcohol abuse. Unlike Hannity, he is not a Republican apparatchik.

Beck has notoriously defamed Obama as a “racist,” but the race card is just one in his deck. His ideology, if it can be called that, mixes idolatrous Ayn Rand libertarianism with bumper-sticker slogans about “freedom,” self-help homilies and lunatic conspiracy theories. (He fanned Internet rumors that FEMA was establishing concentration camps before tardily beating a retreat.) It’s the same crazy-quilt cosmology that could be found in last weekend’s Washington protest, where the marchers variously called Obama a fascist, a communist and a socialist, likening him to Hitler, Stalin, Castro and Pol Pot. They may not know that some of these libels are mutually exclusive. But what they do know is that they need a scapegoat for what ails them, and there is no one handier than a liberal, all-powerful president (who just happens to be black).

Beck captures this crowd’s common emotional denominator — with appropriately overheated capital letters — in his best-selling book portraying himself as a latter-day Tom Paine, “Glenn Beck’s Common Sense.” Americans “know that SOMETHING JUST DOESN’T FEEL RIGHT,” he writes, “but they don’t know how to describe it or, more importantly, how to stop it.” This is right-wing populism in the classic American style, as inchoate and paranoid as that hawked by Father Coughlin during the Great Depression and George Wallace in the late 1960s. Wallace is most remembered for his racism, but he, like Beck, also played on the class and cultural resentment of those sharing his view that there wasn’t “a dime’s worth of difference” between the two parties.

Now, as then, a Dixie-oriented movement like this won’t remotely capture the White House. Now, unlike then, it is a catastrophe for the Republicans. The old G.O.P. Southern strategy is gone with the wind. The more the party is identified with nasty name-calling, freak-show protestors, immigrant-bashing (the proximate cause of Wilson’s outburst at Obama) and, yes, racism, the faster it will commit demographic suicide as America becomes ever younger and more diverse. But Democrats shouldn’t be cocky. Over the short term, the real economic grievances lurking beneath the extremism of the Beck brigades can do damage to both parties. A stopped clock is right twice a day. The recession-spawned anger that Beck has tapped into on the right could yet find a more mainstream outlet in a populist revolt from the left and center.

“Wall Street owns our government,” Beck declared in one rant this July. “Our government and these gigantic corporations have merged.” He drew a chart to dramatize the revolving door between Washington and Goldman Sachs in both the Hank Paulson and Timothy Geithner Treasury departments. A couple of weeks later, Beck mockingly replaced the stars on the American flag with the logos of corporate giants like G.E., General Motors, Wal-Mart and Citigroup (as well as the right’s usual nemesis, the Service Employees International Union). Little of it would be out of place in a Matt Taibbi article in Rolling Stone. Or, we can assume, in Michael Moore’s coming film, “Capitalism: A Love Story,” which reportedly takes on Goldman and the Obama economic team along with conservative targets.

Unlike liberal critics of capitalist inequities, of course, Beck and his claque are driven by an over-the-top detestation of government. Washington is always the enemy, stealing their hard-earned money to redistribute it to the undeserving and shiftless poor (some of whom just happen to be immigrants or black). Though there is nothing Obama can do to stop racists from being racist, he could help stanch the economic piece of this by demonstrating how a reformed government can at times actually make Americans’ lives better. That’s what F.D.R. did, and that’s the promise Obama made, swaying some Republicans and even some racists, during the campaign.

Too many Americans are impatiently waiting for results. It’s hard to argue that the stimulus package reviled by big government-loathers is a success when unemployment continues to rise and most Americans feel none of the incipient “recovery” spotted by Ben Bernanke. The potential dividends to be gained at the end of the protracted health care debate also remain, for now, an abstraction to many who have lost and are continuing to lose their jobs, their savings and their homes.

Nor has Obama succeeded in persuading critics on the left or right that he will do as much for those Americans who are suffering as he has for the corporations his administration and his predecessor’s rushed to rescue. To mark the anniversary of Lehman’s fall, the president gave a speech on Wall Street last Monday again vowing reform. But everyone’s back to business as usual: The Wall Street Journal reported that not a single C.E.O. from a top bank attended. The speech sank with scant notice because there has been so little action to back it up and because its conciliatory stance was tone-deaf to the anger beyond the financial district.

That same day a United States District Court judge in New York, Jed S. Rakoff, scathingly condemned the Obama Securities and Exchange Commission for letting Bank of America skate away with what Rakoff called an immoral and unjust wrist tap to settle charges that it covered up $3.6 billion paid out in bonuses when it purchased Merrill Lynch. How is this S.E.C. a change from the Clinton-Bush S.E.C. that ignored all the red flags on Bernie Madoff?

Beck frequently strikes the pose of an apocalyptic prophet, even insisting that he predicted 9/11. This summer he also started warning of domestic terrorism in the form of a new Timothy McVeigh. On this, one fears he knows whereof he speaks. For all our nation’s unfinished business on race, racism is not Obama’s biggest challenge during our unfinished Great Recession. He — and our political system — are being seriously tested by a rage that is no less real for being shouted by a demagogue from Fox and a backbencher from South Carolina.

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Why the Public Option Is Not "Fading" -- Just the Contrary

Robert Creamer
The Huffington Post
September 13, 2009

The Sunday New York Times ran a front page story headlined "The Fading Public Option." Since the beginning of the health care debate in April, the main stream media and purveyors of Conventional Wisdom have regularly pronounced the public option dead and gone. But in fact they continue to be dead wrong.

In fact, the prospects that there will be some form of public option in the final health insurance reform measure this fall have actually increased over the last month. Here is why:

1). The odds have dropped that some sort of "bipartisan" consensus will become the final template for a bill. That has reduced the ability of Republicans to tube a public option as a condition of their support.

From day one, the Republicans were never going to support a public health insurance option for everyday Americans. The Republican party staunchly opposed Medicare forty years ago. Despite former House Speaker Newt Gingrich's hope that it would "wither on the vine," Medicare is now an unassailably popular public health insurance option for seniors. The Republicans and private insurance industry will do everything they can to prevent the American people from having access to another -- undeniably superior -- public health insurance plan.

The insurance industry desperately wants to protect its "right" to raise prices and take home huge profits -- to skim off as large a portion as they can of every dollar spent on health care.

So the insurance industry and Republicans were never going to agree to a public option. What has changed is that the Republican decision to try to block health insurance reform has completely eliminated their leverage over what will be in the final bill. In the end, Democrats are increasingly clear that they will have to pass health insurance reform with Democratic votes -- which we can -- either by using reconciliation rules or by securing 60 votes for cloture from Democrats and 50 votes for final passage.

2). The pundits ignore the legislative facts on the ground. Four of the five committees with jurisdiction in this debate have reported out bills with a strong public option. The bill that passes the House at the end of this month will include a strong public option. Whether or not the bill that passes out of the Senate has such a provision, the House-Senate conference committee will likely send a final bill with some form of public option to both chambers for final passage. That's because a bill without a public option will have a hard time passing the House and a bill with a public option can, in fact, get more than 50 votes in the Senate.

3). The president has made it very clear that he not only supports a public option, but he will demand some mechanism to assure a competitive market place and drive down costs.

The Republicans played right into his hands with their new talking points on this week's Sunday news shows. Virtually every Republican argued that the Massachusetts plan -- that requires everyone to purchase health insurance -- has the highest health care costs in the country. Precisely. You can't force everyone to purchase insurance from private health insurers unless you create competitive pressure to control costs by giving consumers the right to choose a public health insurance plan.

The private insurers would love the government to require every citizen and most businesses to buy their product -- who wouldn't? What they don't want is regulation, or worse yet, competition, that prevents them from doing whatever they can to make as much as they can. And remember that the insurance companies are exempt from the anti-trust laws that seek to assure competition in other markets. They can collude, divide up territories and drive up prices until they're blue in the face.

An AMA survey, released in late January, gives a score gauging the concentration of the commercial market for 314 metropolitan statistical areas. The report showed 94% had commercial markets that were "highly concentrated" by standards set by the Federal Trade Commission and Justice Department.

In Maine, for instance, one company -- Wellpoint -- had 71% of the market. The second competitor was Aetna with only 12%.

There is another way to control the behavior of the private insurance companies when we mandate coverage -- serious rate regulation -- treat them like regulated public utilities.

Rate regulation is an even more serious political lift than a public option -- which is also a much more efficient means of assuring competitive prices than rate regulation.

The pundits, insurance companies and Republicans need to get used to one idea. Many Democrats -- including the president -- will ensure that the final bill have some robust means of ensuring competition and controlling prices, and a robust public health insurance plan is the best option on the table.

4). Giving Americans a choice of a public health insurance option remains incredibly popular. A poll conducted for Americans United for Change by the respected firm of Anzelone and Liszt -- completed last Friday -- shows that, by a 62% to 28% margin, likely 2010 voters would be more inclined to support President Obama's healthcare reform plan if it included a public option that gave people a choice between private insurance plans and a public health insurance plan.

Voters like the idea of making a choice themselves -- and not having the choice made for them by Republicans who are trying to defend the profits of private health insurers. The voters have been unaffected by the insurance industry-generated talk that giving them that choice would prove the demise of the private health insurance industry.

There are three major forces that keep pushing the notion that "public option is dead." First are the Republicans and insurance industry that want to weave a "public option is impossible" narrative in order to create a self-fulfilling prophecy. They hope that if public option proponents think it is impossible, they will give up. That motivation is completely understandable, but Progressives shouldn't fall for it -- or contribute to it.

The second is a desire in the media to create a story that President Obama has "mishandled" the health care debate. That is simply wrong. President Obama has moved us closer to giving America universal health care than any other president in 60 years, and the odds are very good he will succeed where all others have failed.

But the third is the most insidious. It is the cynicism in the media -- and Washington Conventional Wisdom -- that anything fundamental cannot pass out of Congress. That there isn't any hope that everyday Americans can defeat the special interests. It is the same cynicism that convinced most of the "sophisticated" in-the-know Capitol Hill insiders that Barack Obama could never be elected president. And to that cynicism I give the same answer that we gave then, and that thousands gave at the president's Minneapolis health care rally on Saturday: "yes, we can."

Copyright 2009 HuffingtonPost.com