Obama's Abortion Sellout?
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Nancy Pelosi sacrificed abortion protections to get health care passed. Peter Beinart argues the tradeoff saves the bill and the party, Amy Siskind says Obama let women down again, and Dana Goldstein asks whether this new wedge issue will tear Dems apart.
The Wedge Dividing Obama's Health Coalition
Dana Goldstein is an associate editor and writer at The Daily Beast. Her work on politics, women’s issues, and education has appeared in The American Prospect, Slate, BusinessWeek, The New Republic, and The Nation.
Many Democrats cheered when the health bill passed the House, but pro-choice groups denounced a last-minute amendment to ban coverage of abortions. Now the issue is tearing apart health-reform supporters in the Senate.
Forget Bipartisanship
Paul Begala is a CNN political contributor and a research professor at Georgetown University's Public Policy Institute. He was a senior strategist for the 1992 Clinton-Gore campaign and served as counselor to President Clinton in the White House.
Health-care reform passed the House with just one GOP vote, and the fetishists of bipartisanship are clucking. But Paul Begala says after the bipartisan march to war in Iraq and other disasters, the Democrats are making a smart bet.
The Democrats' Midterm Nightmare
Matt Miller is a management consultant, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, and the host of public radio’s popular political week-in-review, Left, Right & Center. His new book is The Tyranny of Dead Ideas.
As House leaders push to pass health-care reform, a major political headache looms: The bill's impact won't be felt until long after already anxious voters go to the polls in 2010.
Lloyd Grove is editor at large for The Daily Beast. He is also a frequent contributor to New York magazine and was a contributing editor for Condé Nast Portfolio. He wrote a gossip column for the New York Daily News from 2003 to 2006. Prior to that, he wrote the Reliable Source column for the Washington Post, where he spent 23 years covering politics, the media, and other subjects.
Lee Siegel has written about culture and politics and is the author of three books: Falling Upwards: Essays in Defense of the Imagination; Not Remotely Controlled: Notes on Television; and, most recently, Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob. In 2002, he received a National Magazine Award for reviews and criticism.
Peter Beinart, senior political writer for The Daily Beast, is a professor of journalism and political science at City University of New York and a senior fellow at the New America Foundation.
Gerald Posner is The Daily Beast's Chief Investigative Reporter. He's the award-winning author of 10 investigative nonfiction bestsellers, ranging from political assassinations, to Nazi war criminals, to 9/11, to terrorism. His latest book, Miami Babylon: Crime, Wealth and Power—A Dispatch from the Beach, was published in October. He lives in Miami Beach with his wife, the author Trisha Posner.
Martin Jacques is the cofounder of the UK think tank Demos, writes a regular column for The Guardian, and is a visiting research fellow at the London School of Economics Asia Research Centre. His new book, When China Rules the World, is available now.
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