Daddy’s Boy: Andrew Sullivan’s Presidential Crush

Posted on Jun 5, 2012

AP/Nam Y. Huh

Andrew Sullivan speaks at the 2004 convention of the Log Cabin Republicans in Palm Springs, Calif.

By Scott Tucker

(Page 4)

The good doctors who formed the Physicians for a National Health Program are not cheering, and do not agree that the individual mandate plan deserves the name of universal health care. Obama’s health care plan would serve once again to lock millions of Americans into the embrace of private insurance companies, even as it would still leave millions of Americans uninsured. Rep. Dennis Kucinich of Ohio finally made his peace with that health care plan after getting a ride in Air Force One and before losing his seat in Congress. Whatever anyone thinks of Kucinich—and I think he is a deeply decent man—the Democratic Party is a party of structural inequality, and a handful of dissenters in Congress will never turn it into a party of social democracy.

Whatever the Supreme Court decides in reviewing the health care plan of the Obama administration, it is a model political lesson in the inability of career Democrats to fight for reforms on the solid ground of class-conscious politics. That reform was founded upon political quicksand, since Obama and his partisan colleagues never made the most elementary public case for social democracy in the provision of health care. The congressional hearings on health care reform were restricted by bipartisan design, and Dr. Margaret Flowers of Physicians for a National Health Program was among those arrested for daring to speak up for a fair debate.

As for the war in Afghanistan, Sullivan is more triumphalist than Obama’s own press secretary. All the other imperial invaders (including the Romans, the British and the Russians) finally beat a bloody retreat from Afghanistan, though Sullivan confidently declares victory—not on behalf of a nation or an administration, but on behalf of Obama. To be sure, the cloud of drones does not always make surgical strikes on terrorists, but otherwise scatters only the seeds of democracy from a benevolent distant land. Sullivan would have us believe the sun is still rising on the American Empire in the year 2012, but he has mistaken twilight for dawn. The sun was setting on the British Empire through the first half of the 20th century, and British voters gave social democracy a fair chance only after two world wars. So I will not dare predict how many decades this American imperial twilight may yet last, nor whether American voters will weather greater catastrophes before voting out this corporate regime.

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