There has been much fanfare of Obama’s speech in front of Congress last night from liberals. I read the first six or so blog posts on the speech Huffington Post last night, and they were a bit absurd in their romanticism of the event.  

Paul Begala explained “Why I Loved Obama’s Health Care Speech.”

Jacob Heilbrun claimed he had “come out swinging” and made the “single most persuasive case for government intervention in decades.”

From Bill Cunningham: “Tonight, we saw a leader, unafraid to stand and deliver…not a political document, but a platform that all who care about real reform, can support and amend and work for.”

And it wasn’t just on Huffington Post. Katrina vanden Heuvel (who I interned for and have co-written pieces with) was more enthusiastic than I would have expected, saying Obama showed his progressive “spine.”

On MSNBC, Steve Hilderberg, a former Obama campaign staffer who has been organizing with others former staffers to demand a public option, seemed unperturbed that Obama, for all practical purposes, caved to the Blue Dogs who oppose the idea, and not the progressives that elected him.

When asked by Kieth Olberman if Obama’s speech was strong enough, he said “For sure. I never had any doubt, this favor is on side of American people and not in bed with special interests … he hit it out of the ballpark.”

Now, I know there is a desire to defend Obama, given that he has been subject to absurd lies and distortions from a right-wing base that has become more delusional and vitriolic than in recent memory.

But progressives have got to get past the glowing rhetoric, and notice something very important: Obama is going to pass a pretty shitty bill.

Sure, the bill will be better than the status quo; there will be some subsidies for lower middle class people. But also dreaded mandate — a gift to insurance companies, who love that 46 million people must purchase poor and overpriced healthcare plans that still leave them open to financial ruin.

There will almost assuredly be no public option. Even with 59-60 seats in the Senate, Democrats will not so much as accept a minuscule public option to insure just a tiny fraction of the population.

This idea that Obama is restating the case for liberalism is an absurd overstatement. There are huge majorities, and a self-described progressive president with a mandate for change, and we going to end up with a bill dictated largely by what Blue Dogs and insurance companies want (a mandate and no public option).

As Ezra Klein noted, there are not so much changes, but merely improvements.

Anyway, in today’s Christian Science Monitor, I make the case that the disappointing nature of the healthcare package outlined by Obama is a reason that advocates of universal healthcare, need to focus, not on Washington — which is so impervious to change — but in state houses across the country. http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/…

There has been tremendous work on this issue done in Vermont, as I note in the piece.