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Team Obama's Fall Classic
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The game within the game (AP Photo/David J. Phillip)
After writing a series of articles and making a series of videos about the fight for real health reform, from a Florida perspective, I recently took a little end-of-Summer break to catch my breath and cleanse the old mental palate before coming back for more.
For me, Sports - Baseball, to be specific - New York Yankees Baseball, to be honest - has always helped that way, providing a refreshing and restorative change of cerebral scenery.
As Fate would have it, flying from Florida to NYC, visiting the impressive new Yankee Stadium in the Bronx, and watching the Yanks play 3 games in 3 days against 3 different opponents proved to be both great escape, and apt allegory.
Quick note to all you head-shaking Red Sox fans and assorted other Yankee-haters: Give me a break, I was born and raised for the first 12 years of my life about a mile and a half away from Yankee Stadium. It’s a cliché, sure, but it’s in my blood.
Also in my blood, passed down from politically informed and involved immigrant grandparents, to my activist/unionist mother, to my brothers and me, and to our children, is an acute awareness of the ongoing social struggle of working families for a better life.
So not so strangely enough, I left the Bronx after the last of my three-game set, heading back to The Sunshine State with a cloud of baseball and health reform thoughts swirling together in my noggin.
Excited lifer of a Yankee fan that I am, I can’t help but have World Series dreams after seeing The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly aspects of the team during my 3-game close-up look. As imperfect as they may have been on a number of levels, I still came away believing they could end up as the last team standing this year.
On the flight from LaGuardia to West Palm Beach, alternating between reading Sports & News recaps and forecasts, I couldn’t avoid the analogous juxtaposition of the Yankees’ 2009 battle to win a World Series for the first time since 2000, and a U.S. President’s struggle to win a Big Victory for America’s working wounded and middle-class families - also for the first time since 2000.
I had just watched the Yankees successively blow away a far lesser opponent, find a way to come from behind and win against a very tough opponent, and finally, under-perform and brazenly brawl in the dirt and dust of an ugly loss to a mediocre opponent.
Even though my final firsthand look was at The Bad And The Ugly of this year’s team, I saw and felt enough of The Good - a combination of talent, grit, and spirit - to make me a believer, to let me dream those World Series dreams without feeling delusional.
And what about the allegory? How has the Obama team’s current season unfolded in this summer of health care reform discontent?
Forget the World Series, what about dreams of real, transformative health care reform?
Well, great mid-flight thinker that I am, I munched my wee free airline snack and postulated that if the Obama administration could just reverse the order of events as they’d unfolded for the Yanks over their trio of games, then hell, they too could win it all this Fall, fulfilling a dream that would be one for the books, as they say.
I sipped orange juice - okay, a screwdriver - and reflected about my version of Game One in this litmus test of potential success - how President Obama and his administration had for months under-performed and scuffled over health reform in political trench warfare against - no similarity or offense intended to any Yankee opponents, mind you - the Insurance & Drug cartels’ frontline armada of tea-baggers, know-nothings and kooks.
As was the case when the Yankees left their “A” game at home and ended up getting into a wrestling match, Team Obama was a big, bad and ugly loser in Game One.
But any great competitor in any arena, any great team in any endeavor, is great in large part because of an ability to learn from mistakes, adapt, and overcome.
And so weeks ago in what were still the “dog days of summer”, the President and those pushing along with him from so many different directions, doubled down and fought back against the anti-reform disinformation campaign in stronger, more effective ways.
They stopped focusing on the freakish frontlines, instead targeting the far more formidable politicians and media whores fueling them, and the for-profit healthcare industry funding them.
No more under-estimating the opponent, no lack of focus or intensity. That’s how you win the close ones, and that’s how Obama and company won Game Two.
That brings us to Game Three - Team Obama vs. the Anti-Public Option members of Congress - in a best out of three series. It’s the rubber match, the tiebreaker, and the game that is still in play. No game clock in Baseball, or health reform, apparently.
In the case of the Yankees’ allegorically equivalent game, they were at or near the top of their form, hitting - and pitching - on all cylinders, confident and resolute. When they play that way, they almost always get their way.
We can only hope for the same out of the White House team. As is the case with the Yanks, the active involvement of team supporters will help. But there can be no more wavering of resolve by the team captain, as there was when the President failed to label a new American Public Option Health Plan as a non-negotiable linchpin of any final reform legislation.
Still, we fans and activists continue to “have his back”. Or perhaps more accurately, the backs of the nearly 50 million Americans without health insurance, the backs of the millions more who are under-insured, and the backs of those who are one more economic downturn away from losing their employer-paid health coverage, if not their jobs.
While it’s fair to want Captain O to “cowboy up”, bare down and throw every pitch hard and inside for the duration, it’s also essential for the rest of our vast team to keep swinging away at those in Congress - like Florida’s own Democratic U.S. Senator Nelson - who believe that it’s their will, rather than the will of the American people, that will ultimately determine the outcome of this epic battle.
Such elected officials must understand that if we lose now, they will lose later, at the ballot box. Like baseball fans say after a losing season, just wait till next year…
But we haven’t lost yet. Getting back into the swing of things in South Florida, I can feel the energy, intensity and yes, the teamwork of the scores of citizens and organizations still fighting together to help win this extra inning affair, win it on our terms, win it for all of America.
Despite anything and everything you may hear to the contrary, this game is not over.
Buy me some peanuts and crackerjacks…
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