Hold This Max

There was one beautiful moment during the Montana "Town hall" healthcare reform meeting that probably escaped most watchers but early into it, Barack Obama took off his coat to do the old "roll-up-my-sleeves-and-get-to-work routine , turned around, and handed it to the slightly mortified "smilin" Max Baucus, Montanas senior Senator. Max is the White House lackey charged with making sure "reform" means getting more profits to the health insurance industry and being the bosses coat holder had layers of meaning (at least to a theory wonk like troutsky).He sat there sheepishly holding his masters coat trying to look serious and engaged. The poor citizens took the whole Spectacle seriously and asked polite questions and the media praised the over-all civil tone of the fake "discussion".

As to meaning, first, despite the lack of ethnic diversity, Montana is home to lots of racists and I would have loved to have seen their faces during the exchange. Secondly, every Montanan knows Max is a spineless intellectual featherweight who has built a career on hollow, feel-good rhetoric and carrying water for corporate America. To see the eloquent, smooth, confident Obama dismiss him so...effortlessly...,was a treat for those of us who are sick to death of the perpetually grinning fool. One can picture Max and Grassley talking for hours about their favorite Golden Girls episodes while watching child porn in the Capitol steam room.

As for health-care reform, it has turned out exactly as all radicals knew it would, just as all such "reform" does, just as the Employee Free Choice Act did, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, etc etc... The big question is whether Labor and other "progressives" will have finally have had enough with capitalist "politics", the capitalist state, or capitalism in general.

Obama is only doing his bit, his assigned role, but even he seems a little shocked by the total vacuousness of the formal "democracy" he seems to believe in so much. The idiot attacks, the rumours, the nutso gun folk etc, might be rending a hole in his own optimism and belief in Markets.