Dr. Errington Thompson

Barack Obama was swept into power by a kind of mandate that we haven’t seen in a generation. The Republicans are out and the Democrats are in. With Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid at the helm, the American people have charged the Democratic Party to fix the country. We were told we needed a strong economic stimulus package in order to pull an economy out of a freefall. We were told that we needed to bail out two of the big three auto companies. So, we listened and gave the keys to the country to the Democrats. Or did we?

We are now 18 months into the world of Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid. Barack Obama, as he promised, did not shy away from healthcare reform. After a bruising 14-month process (much longer if you include the initiatives that Clinton started in 1994), I’m left feeling that I’ve taken a big bite of tofu cake. There isn’t much taste and there isn’t much substance.

Progressives wanted a single-payer system, in which the government pays for healthcare for all of us; this was taken off the table before negotiations even got started. Then the public option was dangled in front of our eyes as a good way to control costs; in the end, it, too, was stripped out of the bill. Progressives wanted to cover all the uninsured; instead we will cover a little more than half of the millions of Americans without health care.

Financial reform was a big agenda item for everybody in Washington. At least, everyone was singing “kumbaya” in the beginning. Republicans and Democrats said we needed to tweak the system to make sure that we were never on the hook for trillions of dollars because Wall Street was “too big to fail.”

Derivatives trading was one of the major culprits of the economic meltdown. If Congress truly had our best interests in mind, derivatives, which are completely unregulated, would be regulated, and financial institutions would be forced down to a reasonable size so that if they failed, we would not have to ride in and save them. Watered-down derivatives regulation appears to have made it into the final bill, but there is nothing on “too big to fail.”

How did two major pieces of legislation end up gutted? The simple answer is lobbyists. The influence of big business over Congress is enormous. Every representative, every senator has to raise millions of dollars towards his or her reelection campaign. A typical House campaign costing $1.5 million requires $15,000 in contributions every week, year in, year out. Raising this kind of money can take 20 percent to 30 percent of an elected official’s time.

You and I, Joe Public, we don’t consistently support Capitol Hill with our hard-earned dollars. We don’t set aside money to give to our senators or representative. But big business and its lobbyists do; they are there to help both Republicans and Democrats get reelected — whichever will look out for their interests. They help set up fundraisers, greasing the wheels and bundling contributions so that our congressmen get what they want — reelected.

In return, the lobbyists get what they want — the kind of access that you and I can only dream about. They can pick up the phone and have a meeting with an influential senator or congressman or their important staff members within weeks, or days, or even hours. Therefore — and this is critically important — their side of the story gets heard unfiltered.

It is these lobbyists who told Congress that the public option was going to kill jobs and hurt the greatest healthcare system in the world. It is these same lobbyists who are arguing that megabanks have to be megahuge in order to serve multinational corporations and the changing needs of the American public. This is why the American people see good ideas go into Congress and watered-down legislation come out for the president to sign.

Until we fix the system, I don’t see how we’re going to get effective legislation through Congress. It seems to me that neither the president nor the speaker of the House or the majority leader of the Senate is really in charge.

It seems, then, we gave the keys to our country not to the Democrats but to the lobbyists — they are the ones in charge. We didn’t elect them, and unfortunately (though not unsurprisingly) they don’t seem to have our best interests at heart.