A thousand demonstrators gathered at North Carolina’s capitol last Saturday to support United States President Barack Obama’s proposals for universal healthcare.
In one of four rallies across the state, some carried placards stating: “If it’s broke, fix it” and ‘Insurance profits bad for my health”, while ironic “Billionaires against healthcare” strode the grounds in top hats, carrying fat cigars and glasses of champagne.
Across the street stood 50 counter- protesters with signs saying ‘Socialism is an Obamanation”, and “Revolution is brewing: 2010″, and ‘Not ready for Obama’s communist America”.
With Congress about to return to work, the struggle for healthcare reform is reaching its most intense phase.
Opportunities for a Democratic president to overhaul the system while his party controls both houses of Congress come around once in a generation — if that. Yet in recent months the momentum has been slipping away.
According to an ABC/Washington Post poll earlier this year, 53% of Americans approved of Obama’s handling of healthcare reform, against 39% who did not.
Today 50% disapprove and only 46% back him. To get through Congress, any Bill inevitably contains compromises. The issue is who will need to be placated and what will have to be surrendered.
Faulkner Fox, an organiser for Durham 4 Obama, knew there would be times like this. From the moment she started campaigning for Obama during the primaries, she has provided unstinting but critical support.
After Obama took North Carolina by a hair’s breadth in November — the first Democrat to do so since Jimmy Carter — she demanded that the campaign leave data so the local group could continue organising.
In January, before the inauguration, she called a meeting to talk about the way forward. She expected about 40; more than three times that number showed up.
“We brought together a very diverse, brilliant group of people and it was clear to me that this should not stop. We could not let those people go back into the woodwork. We had to keep going.
“We never thought Obama would do all the things we wanted to do and always knew we would have to pressure him. That’s how politics works.”
They formed working groups and started organising. Michael Pearlmutter, who co-chairs the healthcare committee, provides a daily digest of the day’s healthcare stories.
One of their principal targets is their senator, Kay Hagan, who swept in on Obama’s coat-tails but has since dragged her feet on all major votes. A moderate Democrat in a conservative state, she is anxious to find ways to cover her right flank.
But Faulkner, Pearlmutter and their fellow activists have given her little wriggle room. “We flood her voicemail,” says Fox “We visit her, email and get people to write her letters. She does the right thing in the end. But we have to make her.”
Last week 75 people arrived to learn about campaigning, including how to deal peacefully with rightwing hecklers.
Central to derailing Obama’s reforms has been the high-profile disruption of town hall meetings by conservatives alleging, among other things, that universal healthcare would create death panels that could kill your grandmother.
Small in number but well organised, they captured the attention of the media. Like the “birthers”, who insist that Obama was not born in the United States, most of their claims are not only demonstrably false but downright daft.
They have argued that if Steven Hawking were British he would be dead, even though Hawking is British and alive. They insist that under the British tax-funded National Health Service the state decides whether to “pull the plug on grandma”.
But life expectancy in the UK is higher than in the US, meaning that even with supposed state-sponsored euthanasia, British grannies live longer.
One protester, hospitalised after he got into a fight at a town hall meeting in St Louis, had to have a whip-round to pay for his medical bill — he had no health insurance. There are legitimate arguments, both philosophical and economic, against the proposed reforms.
Antipathy towards government runs deep here, and last week the national debt was forecast to reach $9-trillion. But that would be a case for a different overhaul — not none. Sooner or later something must be done about US healthcare.
As a percentage of GDP, the US spends twice as much on it as the UK, and yet one in six aren’t even covered. Albanian women have a higher life expectancy. Cuba has lower infant mortality. This national disgrace conceals a regional outrage.
Black infant mortality in Louisiana is on a par with Sri Lanka; in the very city where the reforms will be decided, Washington DC, life expectancy is lower than in the Gaza Strip.
The rightwing protests are ridiculous, but that does not prevent them from being effective. “It’s much easier to turn up at a meeting and yell,” says Pearlmutter, “than to propose something that works. Healthcare is complicated. Even within our group there are many different positions.”
The fact that the right has diminished Obama’s chances does not mean they have boosted their own. An NBC poll shows that whereas only 41% support Obama’s proposals, 62% disapprove of the way the Republicans are handling it.
The problem is not that the right is organised but that — with a few exceptions like Durham — the left has not been. At the very moment when Obama most needed the ‘movement” that got him elected most, it appears to have stopped moving.
The bad news is that there are too few places like Durham. The good news is that there is still time. “We’re not going to out-yell them,” says Fox. “So we have to out-organise them.” —