am in this race because I don’t want to see us spend the next year re-fighting the Washington battles of the 1990s. I don’t want to pit Blue America against Red America; I want to lead a United States of America.” So declared Barack Obama in November 2007, making the case that Democrats should nominate him, rather than one of his rivals, because he could free the nation from the bitter partisanship of the past.
Some of us were skeptical. A couple of months after Mr. Obama gave that speech, I warned that his vision of a “different kind of politics” was a vain hope, that any Democrat who made it to the White House would face “an unending procession of wild charges and fake scandals, dutifully given credence by major media organizations that somehow can’t bring themselves to declare the accusations unequivocally false.”

So, how’s it going?

Sure enough, President Obama is now facing the same kind of opposition that President Bill Clinton had to deal with: an enraged right that denies the legitimacy of his presidency, that eagerly seizes on every wild rumor manufactured by the right-wing media complex.

This opposition cannot be appeased. Some pundits claim that Mr. Obama has polarized the country by following too liberal an agenda. But the truth is that the attacks on the president have no relationship to anything he is actually doing or proposing.

Right now, the charge that’s gaining the most traction is the claim that health care reform will create “death panels” (in Sarah Palin’s words) that will shuffle the elderly and others off to an early grave. It’s a complete fabrication, of course. The provision requiring that Medicare pay for voluntary end-of-life counseling was introduced by Senator Johnny Isakson, Republican — yes, Republican — of Georgia, who says that it’s “nuts” to claim that it has anything to do with euthanasia.

And not long ago, some of the most enthusiastic peddlers of the euthanasia smear, including Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House, and Mrs. Palin herself, were all for “advance directives” for medical care in the event that you are incapacitated or comatose. That’s exactly what was being proposed — and has now, in the face of all the hysteria, been dropped from the bill.

Yet the smear continues to spread. And as the example of Mr. Gingrich shows, it’s not a fringe phenomenon: Senior G.O.P. figures, including so-called moderates, have endorsed the lie.

Senator Chuck Grassley, Republican of Iowa, is one of these supposed moderates. I’m not sure where his centrist reputation comes from — he did, after all, compare critics of the Bush tax cuts to Hitler. But in any case, his role in the health care debate has been flat-out despicable.

Last week, Mr. Grassley claimed that his colleague Ted Kennedy’s brain tumor wouldn’t have been treated properly in other countries because they prefer to “spend money on people who can contribute more to the economy.” This week, he told an audience that “you have every right to fear,” that we “should not have a government-run plan to decide when to pull the plug on grandma.”

Again, that’s what a supposedly centrist Republican, a member of the Gang of Six trying to devise a bipartisan health plan, sounds like.

So much, then, for Mr. Obama’s dream of moving beyond divisive politics. The truth is that the factors that made politics so ugly in the Clinton years — the paranoia of a significant minority of Americans and the cynical willingness of leading Republicans to cater to that paranoia — are as strong as ever. In fact, the situation may be even worse than it was in the 1990s because the collapse of the Bush administration has left the G.O.P. with no real leaders other than Rush Limbaugh.

The question now is how Mr. Obama will deal with the death of his postpartisan dream.

So far, at least, the Obama administration’s response to the outpouring of hate on the right has had a deer-in-the-headlights quality. It’s as if officials still can’t wrap their minds around the fact that things like this can happen to people who aren’t named Clinton, as if they keep expecting the nonsense to just go away.

What, then, should Mr. Obama do? It would certainly help if he gave clearer and more concise explanations of his health care plan. To be fair, he’s gotten much better at that over the past couple of weeks.

What’s still missing, however, is a sense of passion and outrage — passion for the goal of ensuring that every American gets the health care he or she needs, outrage at the lies and fear-mongering that are being used to block that goal.

So can Mr. Obama, who can be so eloquent when delivering a message of uplift, rise to the challenge of unreasoning, unappeasable opposition? Only time will tell.

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company
Paul Krugman is professor of Economics and International Affairs at Princeton University and a regular columnist for The New York Times. Krugman was the 2008 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economics. He is the author of numerous books, including The Conscience of A Liberal, and his most recent, The Return of Depression Economics.
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/08/14-0

Obama could not have been more clear in the past 3 town halls, but that doesn't really matter, for people out there and on the right and left that do not want this, there is not explanation that will satisfy them.

I agree that he must be know by now that there is no such thing as bipartisanship for this president. But if he shows outrage at the misinformation and lack of cooperation on the hill it will just be used against him as well.

They will say he is forcing the plan on the American people. This president can't win because too many people hate his guts, personally, and will stop at nothing to help the opposition hold him back. The people on the hill that hate his guts can't even pretend to like anything he does. Their bias and dislike shows on their faces like a bad pair of glasses.

The ones against Obama are just like the ones against Bush. How was that not mentioned in the article? Liberal media?

If you ask me end-of-life counseling = death panels
just depends on what side you are on. on sounds better than the other but they are the same thing. Does it matter who put it in the bill? No the fact that it is in it is what people don't like.

Do you have a liveing will? basicly all it says is medicare will pay for that service once every five years. Jeeez!

Obama is a bad evil man.

Not that it's any of your business yes I do have one. And seeing as I'm not old enough to be eligable for medicare they are not paying for mine. Maybe if people would be responsible for themselves and not rely on the government for everything we wouldn't need it in the healthcare bill in the first place.

It's not death panels.

It's a provision that would only authorize Medicare to pay doctors for counseling patients about end-of-life care, living wills, hospice care and other issues, if the patient wants it. It's voluntary. What Palin has been saying about is totally wrong, btw.

I've been involved in gerontology. These things are good for the patient. It's better to do it in advance.

Maybe they don't have the money.

When you say end of life counselling = death panel, you are being bit dishonest, no? If you have a living will you know very well it's not about a death panel, yet you choose to say it is, just as some politicians.

Grassley and others removing the provision was meant to show that oh ya it was a bad thing so we removed it. A sneaky way to foster the rumors and give people the idea that it was after all a bad thing and should be stopped but see how wonderful and conscious we are, when in fact is was something they supported before any of this was an issue.

Now had they wanted to be more honest and had thought of it, they might have brought up the fact that it could be done much cheaper, I might have respected that, but no, their agenda is to kill the whole thing and make sure they play along with the peoples outrage.

Now where I agree with you is that in reality if we took more responsibility we would not need the provision, and frankly I think there are easier ways to educate people and put the information out there, such as on the internet, where people can get the information they need and speak to lets say older volunteer councelers at low or not cost, kind of like free /low cost counceling you find for taxes or law.

I understand that you might be suspicious or just plain don't like this president, I can accept that, but when you foster this death panel stuff in a public forum you aren't insulting Obama so much as you are insulting your fellow citizen.

What I think is bad is that you spread this nonsense, but it's your opinion and you have the right...

Ok now.

End of life counseling = a gruop of people ie doctoers sitting down with you to discuss your end of life (death)

Death panel is the same thing just put in diferent words.

By LIZ SIDOTI, Associated Press Writer Liz Sidoti, Associated Press Writer – Sun Aug 16, 7:33 am ET

GRAND JUNCTION, Colo. – Now, it's personal. President Barack Obama invoked his own anguish over the death of a loved one as he challenged the debunked notion that Democratic efforts to overhaul the nation's health care would include "death panels."

"I just lost my grandmother last year. I know what it's like to watch somebody you love, who's aging, deteriorate and have to struggle with that," an impassioned Obama told a crowd as he spoke of Madelyn Payne Dunham. He took issue with "the notion that somehow I ran for public office or members of Congress are in this so they can go around pulling the plug on grandma."

"When you start making arguments like that, that's simply dishonest — especially when I hear the arguments coming from members of Congress in the other party who, turns out, sponsored similar provisions," Obama said.

In a debate in which he often sounds professor-like, Obama spoke with a rare bit of emotion that seemed to counter that of vocal health care opponents as he referenced the beloved grandmother who helped raise him and who he called "Toot." She died of cancer at age 86 on Nov. 2, two days before he won election to become the nation's first African-American president.

He talked about her death while answering a question about misinformation being spread about Democratic health care efforts during a town hall style gathering in a high school gymnasium.

"Health care is really hard. This is not easy. I'm a reasonably dedicated student to this issue. I've got a lot of really smart people around me who've been working on this for months now," he said. "There is no perfect painless silver bullet out there that solves every problem, gives everybody health care for free. There isn't. I wish there was."

But he said that because there's no perfect solution to solving health care, opponents "start saying things like we want to set up death panels to pull the plug on grandma."

The president is seeking to put to rest claims that the health care overhaul he seeks would set up "death panels" to rule on life-sustaining care for ailing seniors. It would not, and Obama has stressed that point repeatedly over the past week.

Obama reiterated his contention that the Democratic health care legislation would not create "death panels" to deny care to frail seniors. Obama has explained that the provision that has caused the uproar would only authorize Medicare to pay doctors for counseling patients about end-of-life care, living wills, hospice care and other issues, if the patient wants it.

Conservatives have called end-of-life counseling in government health care programs like Medicare a step toward euthanasia and former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has likened the idea to a bureaucratic "death panel" that would decide whether sick people get to live. Those claims have been widely discredited but the issue remains a political weapon in the increasingly bitter health care debate.