Reich and His Acolytes (Including Us!)

Robert Reich is one of my great heroes, not least because his smart and compelling arguments for traditional Democratic ideas have such strong crossover appeal. His articles always seem to take into account the reality that at least some conservatives might be swayed – and he is accordingly and sensibly respectful of his political opponents.

But Reich is far less focused in a room full of acolytes. The audience's reverence for Reich made the event feel very much like a kind of secular communion. It also had the uncomfortable feeling of floating in a bubble, a quality which Reich himself commented on.

If you missed the event, here is a summary of Reich's main points:

The Obama administration “overlearned” the Clintons’ mistakes on health care reform in the following ways:

1) Whereas the Clintons handed a complicated HCR package to Congress, Obama gave Congress ownership to build the legislation, which is how Reid, Pelosi, et alia became the guardians - you know the results.

2) Whereas the Clintons let the process drag on until some months before the 1994 elections, Obama has tried to rush it through, at the expense of more pressing issues such as jobs and the economy.

3) Whereas the Clinton plan challenged the authority of pharma and insurers, which ultimately doomed the bill, the Obama team tried to avoid that pitfall by cutting early deals with insurers and pharma, which has created its own problems.

On the HCR spectrum, Reich says there are two poles, with an FDR-style “New Deal” approach on the left, and a free market approach on the right. A brief history:

1. FDR didn’t want to risk his Social Security program by including health care reform

2. Truman tried to pursue national health insurance through the “Fair Deal”; Reich states the difficulty of this greatly harmed Truman’s second term.

3. Eisenhower and Nixon both attempted health care reform along free market ideas. But Ike managed to establish a tax break for employer-provided health care, which is, per Reich, the equivalent of a federal subsidy. Nixon built on Ike’s idea, advocating a “pay-or-play” system for employers, wherein they would either provide health insurance to employees, or would pay into a pool.

4. LBJ was the most successful – because he established Medicare. How?

a) LBJ left the details of HCR to Congress, but he was always a presence, twisting arms, making deals

b) LBJ made use of his landslide victory, understanding that he wouldn’t have much time to push it through

c) LBJ disregarded his own economists.

d) LBJ didn’t have to contend with what Reich calls the current “infrastructure of economists”, which includes the OMB (established under Nixon) and the CBO. These “armies of professional economists” simply didn’t exist at the time.

(Briefly, Reich mentioned the success of GW Bush’s Medicare Drug Benefit, which may have been easier to push through because it actually helped big pharma.)

Conclusion: Reich ended with a message to us – he said that many people who have not been given formal authority actually have more ability to lead than people who have been given such authority. Following in this vein, he described four “work avoidance mechanisms” to which we fall prey – denial, escapism, scape-goating, and cynicism. (As I was typing this, I received an email from another F1200’er who wrote that he thought Reich was perfectly describing Republican errors with the “work avoidance mechanisms” but I’m fairly certain that he was addressing his own acolytes, or at least both sides of the spectrum.)

Reich took approximately 20 minutes of questions, then closed. There was food supplied in the lobby by, of all corporations, Pfizer. We think this is because Pfizer spreads its donations so far, that it often overlooks just whose lecture it is funding.

The best part of the evening: when I initially stepped out of the elevator to go to the Pauley ballroom, there was the tireless UCB student organizer, Robbie Bruens, collecting signatures for the Lakoff Initiative. Between work and school comes organizing - so when does this guy ever sleep? We hope to have more on the initiative and Robbie's progress in coming days.