‘Change without change’ the real Obama mantra

In Financial Times, Clive Crook says it perfectly, as the Fort Worth Police Department claims it was just doing its job.

In case that’s not clear, let’s let Clive speak in detail:

The cap-and-trade bill is a travesty. … The Waxman-Markey bill, while going through the complex motions of creating a carbon abatement regime, takes care to neutralise itself. …

If you regard universal access to health insurance as an urgent priority, as I do, the draft healthcare bills are easier to defend as at least a step in the right direction. Nonetheless, the same evasive mindset – the appetite for change without change – has guided their design. If you are happy with your present insurance, the bills’ designers keep telling voters, you will see no difference. …

The president has cast himself not as a leader of reform, but as a cheerleader for “reform” – meaning anything, really, that can plausibly be called reform, however flawed.

Clive has plenty more like that, ending with this bottom-line question:

First one must ask whether the bills really do represent progress, however modest.

On the two biggest issues, the answer is clearly no.

Obama is lying out his ass with his claims to be able to get a future, second, climate-control bill passed when he didn’t do more of a leadership job on this one.

As for national healthcare? “Change” without a single-payer option isn’t change.