Republican victories in the Virginia and New Jersey governors’ races may send shivers through Democratic circles, but what does it mean for President Barack Obama’s ambitious proposal to overhaul the $2.5 trillion healthcare system?

Not much, say Democrats. They are looking beyond the state issues that dominated the governor’s races and instead are focusing on two congressional races won by Democrats where national issues like healthcare reform were in play. 

“From my perspective we won last night,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told reporters when asked about Tuesday’s elections. “This was a victory for healthcare reform. From my standpoint we picked up votes last night — one in California and one in New York.”

The two victories–one in New York district 23 where Bill Owens became the first Democrat to win the seat in over a century and in California district 10 where John Garamendi kept the seat vacated by Ellen Tauscher in Democratic hands — brings the number of Democrats in the House to 258.

 That gives Pelosi a little more breathing room as she tries to muster the votes needed to pass the sweeping health reform legislation.  She could lose as many as 40 Democrats when the House votes, possibly later this week, and still pass the measure.

The two new members are expected to be sworn into office on Thursday.

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Photo credit: Reuters/Joshua Roberts (House Speaker Nancy Pelosi unveils Democratic healthcare legislation)

Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives are gearing up for an epic battle against the sweeping healthcare reform that Democratic leaders hope to bring to the House floor for debate later this week.

“Our goal is to make this as difficult as possible to vote for it,” said House Republican Leader John Boehner. “We think this bill is the wrong prescription for what ails our healthcare system in America.”

Representative Mike Pence, who heads the House Republican Conference, said the campaign against the bill unveiled last week by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi began over the weekend with Republican members delivering copies of the huge 1,990-page bill to public libraries. Also, Republican women are speaking against the bill this week on the House floor.

“It is a fact that 85 percent of healthcare decisions in this country are made by American women,” Pence said.

On Thursday, House Republicans plan a special Internet town hall meeting. Pence said the discussion with participants will last at least 12 hours.

“Our members are going to stand on principle against Speaker Pelosi’s trillion dollar government takeover of our healthcare system,” Boehner said.

Republicans plan to offer a far less sweeping alternative to the Democratic bill. Boehner said it will focus on reducing the cost of health insurance.

The proposal will allow individuals and businesses to purchase insurance across state lines and to form pools to buy insurance. It will also seek to limit malpractice lawsuits, which Republicans say lead to higher healthcare costs.

The Republican bill will also encourage states to look over their own insurance laws and mandates to find ways to lower costs.

“Many states don’t realize that mandates in their own laws actually drive up the cost of health insurance,” Boehner said.

The Republican bill will not include the sweeping insurance market reforms contained in the Democratic bill, which would bar insurers from excluding people from coverage or charging more because of medical history.

Instead, the Republican bill would provide some federal money to help states create high risk insurance pools where those people could obtain coverage, Boehner said.

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Photo credit: Reuters/Jonathan Ernst (House Republican Leader John Boehner plays golf with Tiger Woods.)

Senator Joe Lieberman, a former Democrat-turned-independent, is at it again — comforting Republicans and irritating Democrats.

This time Lieberman is doing it by saying, “I probably will support some Republican candidates” in next year’s congressional election –  even though he’s still a member of the Senate Democratic Caucus.

“I’m going to call them as I see them,” he said in an interview with ABC News that the network posted on its web site on Friday.

Lieberman riled Democrats last year by campaigning for Republican presidential nominee John McCain. And he upset many of them again this week by saying he would help Republicans block their proposal to create a government-backed insurance program to compete with private insurers.

When it comes to elections, Lieberman said, he backs people on both sides of the political aisle who are more interested in getting things done rather than playing politics.

“There’s a hard core of partisan, passionate, hardcore Republicans,” he told ABC. “There’s a hard core of partisan Democrats on the other side.”

“And inbetween is the larger group, which is people who really want to see the right thing done, or want something good done for this country and them — and that means, sometimes, the better choice is somebody who’s not a Democrat,” Lieberman said.

Lieberman said in the hotly contested race in his home state of Connecticut, he backs incumbent Senate Democrat Chris Dodd.

Lieberman was the Democrats’ 2000 U.S. vice presidential nominee and won three terms to the Senate as a Democrat. But he narrowly won a fourth Senate term in 2006 as an independent after he lost the Democratic nomination to an anti-Iraq war challenger.

A number of Senate Democrats wanted to strip Lieberman of his chairmanship of the Homeland Security Committee for backing McCain’s White House bid. But with the support of Democratic President Barack Obama, Lieberman managed to keep it.

There was fear if he lost the chairmanship, he would become a Republican.

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Photo credit: Reuters/Kevin Lamarque (Lieberman embraces Obama after president’s address to Congress Feb. 24)

Americans are still sharply divided over President Barack Obama’s vision of healthcare overhaul, but they’re starting to come around  — again –  on the so-called public option, so says a new Washington Post/ABC News poll published on Monday.

Fifty-seven percent of all Americans now favor a government-run insurance plan that would compete with private insurers while 40 percent are opposed, according to the poll.

That’s up from 52 percent support in mid-August, but still down from 62 percent in June.

What’s happened since the congressional summer recess  when anger over the prospect of a public option  heated town hall meetings across the country?

The public option (a government-run insurance plan to compete with private insurers) is still favored by Obama and liberal Democrats as a way to increase competition and cut rising costs.

There’s still plenty of opposition from Republicans and other critics who argue that a public option  would be a government takeover and could drive private insurance companies out of business.

In the Senate,  lawmakers are trying to craft a single healthcare bill out of two separate proposals — one with the public option and one without. All three pending House bills include a public option.

Some numbers from the Washington Post/ABC poll:
- 57 percent of Americans now favor a public insurance option, 40 percent are opposed
- 56 percent favor a provision mandating all Americans to buy insurance
- 45 percent favor the broad outlines of the proposals now moving in Congress, 48 percent are opposed
-  seven in 10 Democrats back the plan,  almost nine in 10 Republicans oppose it
- 52 percent of Independents are against proposed reforms, 42 percent are in favor

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Photo credit: Reuters/Hyungwon Kang; Reuters/Jonathan Ernst  ( Pharmacist Sonya Safaie at work in Great Falls, Virginia; /Copy of House healthcare bill HR 3200 )

In the never-ending Democratic struggle to win bipartisan support for healthcare reform, Representative Alan Grayson is probably not the guy to send to the House floor to woo Republicans.

Democrats, he said in a floor speech a couple days ago, want to fix the U.S. healthcare system by expanding insurance coverage to the 47 million people who do not have it.

“The Republican plan,” he said, is basically: “Don’t get sick, and if you do get sick, die quickly.”
 
He brought along big posterboard signs to underscore the idea in the event somebody found his point too subtle.
 
Republicans were not happy with this characterization of their ideas for healthcare and suggested an apology was in order.
 
A much-chastened Grayson returned to the House floor Wednesday to make amends.

“Several Republicans asked me to apologize. Well, I would like to apologize. I would like to apologize to the dead,” he said.
 
He cited a study saying 44,789 Americans die every year because they have no health insurance.
 
“That’s more than 10 times the number of Americans who have died in the war in Iraq. It’s more than 10 times the number of Americans who died in 9/11.”
 
“I apologize to the dead and their families that we haven’t voted sooner to end this Holocaust in America.”
 
Grayson expanded upon his remarks later on CNN after being asked exactly what he meant by saying the Republicans want people to get sick and die quickly. 

“What I mean is they’ve got no plan. It’s been 24 hours since I said that. Where is the Republican plan? We’re all waiting to see something — to take care of people with pre-existing conditions, to take care of the 47 million people in this country who have no coverage at all. There is no plan, and that’s what I meant when I said the Republican plan really is: Don’t get sick. And if you do get sick, die quickly.”
 
Representative Joe Wilson, who shouted “You lie” at Obama during a joint session of Congress and quickly said he was sorry, declined to get into the apology issue in an interview with Fox News.
 
But he said Grayson was wrong about Republican healthcare ideas.
 
“The Republican plan is really one that it provides for affordability, accessibility,” he said. “It provides for helping with pre-existing conditions. It is a very positive, targeted health insurance reform.”
 
Representative Barney Frank, a Democrat, told the Lou Dobbs radio program Grayson’s performance “wasn’t civil at all” but added he saw “a little bit of excessive indignation and sound and fury” in the outraged Republican response.
 
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi tried to avoid the issue when asked about it at her weekly press conference. Pressed on whether Grayson should apologize, she said, “If anybody is going to apologize, everybody should apologize. You know?”
 
Asked what the president thought of the remarks, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs fled to the high ground.
 
“We ought to be able,” he said, “to have an honest, calm debate about healthcare, the need for healthcare reform, without disparaging each other.”
 
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President Barack Obama used “new approach” a couple of times to describe a shift in U.S. missile defense policy, but his statement was so steeped in diplo-speak that it led to much initial head-scratching over what was actually new and different.

It was left to Defense Secretary Robert Gates to shoot down as “misinformed” raging speculation that the United States was scrapping missile defense in Europe. He said the United States would initially deploy ships equipped with missile interceptors to Europe.

Keep in mind that Gates was also defense secretary under President George W. Bush who had pushed for the agreements to build missile interceptors and radar in Poland and the Czech Republic — a move that had royally angered Russia.

Obama appeared to be trying to stay a step ahead of the expected onslaught of Republican criticism that he was going soft on national security.

He started off by reminding everyone that he was commander-in-chief (something his predecessor did quite frequently), and in the next breath said “I’m committed to doing everything in my power to advance our national security.”

It didn’t take long for the Republican floodgates to open up. Senator Richard Shelby said Obama’s decision “to appease Russia is misguided at best and dangerous at worst.”

Bush stood firm against Russia’s irritation at the missile defense plan. Obama must see greater benefit to removing that thorn from U.S.-Russian relations.

What do you think are the benefits or dangers of the “new approach” ?

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Photo Credit: Reuters/Larry Downing (Obama talks about missile defense)

Former President Jimmy Carter said out loud what Democrats had been whispering for a while, that the protests against the country’s first black president are tinged with racism.

Carter’s forceful words threw the issue into the forefront of public debate.

“I think an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man, that he’s African American,” Carter said in an interview on NBC.

While others had raised the issue, it wasn’t until Carter’s blunt words that it reached a crescendo as loud as the protests.

Carter mentioned his southern roots in saying ”that racism inclination still exists” in the country and many white people believe African Americans are not qualified to be president.

Critics of Obama have protested at town hall meetings around the country, rallied in Washington, and even yelled out on the floor of the House of Representatives (Congressman Joe Wilson’s “you lie”).

Michael Steele, the first black chairman of the Republican National Committee, issued a statement that said: “President Carter is flat out wrong. This isn’t about race. It is about policy.”

Steele accused Democrats of trying to shift attention away from the president’s unpopular healthcare plan.

“Characterizing Americans’ disapproval of President Obama’s policies as being based on race is an outrage and a troubling sign about the lengths Democrats will go to disparage all who disagree with them,” he said.

Obama did not respond to a shouted question by a reporter about Carter’s racism comments.

UPDATE: White House spokesman Robert Gibbs says that Obama doesn’t believe the criticism is racist. “The president does not believe that it’s based on the color of his skin.”

Is there an objective barometer for whether a protest is based on racism or policy?

What do you think? Are the protests about race or policy or both?

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Photo Credit: Reuters/Eric Thayer (Carter at 2008 Democratic National Convention), Reuters/Molly Riley (Steele after being elected RNC chairman in January)

Have a hankering to visit a hospital in Hawaii?

You could win a trip to tour the hospital where President Barack Obama was born. All you have to do is to submit the winning idea on how people can help Obama change the country for the better.

Progress Now, a liberal grass roots group, launched a new program to urge people across the country to help Obama pass healthcare reform and enact his other core campaign promises.

According to a press release, this campaign is the first part of the national launch of the ‘50 Ways You Can Help Obama Change America’ — a book by ProgressNow founder Michael Huttner.

“The campaign and book are designed to inspire more people to help — at a time when progressive values are under attack in Washington and across the nation,” Huttner said.

ProgressNow and its state partners are seeking entries on how to help Obama change America. You can enter the contest by clicking here.

The grand prize will be a trip for two to Honolulu for a private tour of the hospital where Obama was born, followed by a chance to take part in a community service project there on Jan 18.

The contest comes as Obama struggles to win enough support in Congress to pass a plan to overhaul the U.S. healthcare system amid mounting public skepticism and unified Republican opposition.

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Photo credit: Reuters/Hugh Gentry (Obama supporter at campaign party after November election)

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi hit back at protesters vocally disrupting healthcare reform meetings around the country, calling them “un-American” - and with that word ignited the ire of opposition Republicans.

Pelosi and Democratic Majority Leader Steny Hoyer wrote in USA Today that there was an “ugly campaign” to misrepresent the healthcare overhaul legislation being written in Congress and stop public debate, which they said is “at the heart of our democracy.”

Opponents have shouted down lawmakers at town meetings held to explain the healthcare ideas, calling the proposed government-run insurance program to compete with private insurers “socialism” - a fighting word in American politics.  “Drowning out opposing views is simply un-American,” the Democrats wrote.

The other side was quick to lob equally barbed words back. “Each public forum should give every participant the opportunity to express their views, but to label Americans who are expressing vocal opposition to the Democrats’ plan ‘un-American’ is outrageous and reprehensible,” said House Republican Leader John Boehner.

Congress is on break for the month of August, during which time Democrats were to try to sell healthcare reform ideas to the public.

In the first week of the summer recess, headlines have focused more on the raucous public meetings than on the healthcare legislation itself.

Has the Democratic strategy to win public support for healthcare reform backfired?

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