commissioner.org
| Source | Dave Anderson |
| Date | 10/02/13/22:47 |
| blogs.usatoday.com
TVA holds lessons for Obama Today’s health care debate parallels FDR’s battles in the 1930s. By Diane McWhorter As President Obama ponders the fate of health care reform, he would do well to review the mother-of-all-strife between government and private enterprise, the New Deal. Franklin D. Roosevelt's battle with the electricity industry over the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) was an uncanny template for the recent health care hostilities. And it might suggest a strategy better than "bipartisanship" for any future administration plans to afflict the powerful. The TVA was an ambitious public project, coordinating hydroelectricity and land management in what its sponsors considered a moral crusade to help suffering Southern farmers — the Great Depression counterparts of the Great Recession's medically disadvantaged. It was also Exhibit A in corporate America's brief against New Deal "socialism." Among the other echoes between the showdowns over the TVA and health care: an embattled industry striking back with an egregious war chest; a distracted president constrained by conservative Democrats; a nation in grave need of the services at stake; and a pivotal senator from Nebraska. The TVA Act — signed on May 18, 1933 — shines a light on the crucial flaw in the stalled health care bill: The TVA was the "public option," its professed purpose to provide a "yardstick" to prevent private utilities from gouging customers. Though somewhat specious, the yardstick was politically attractive: Private power had been implicated in the 1929 stock market crash, and the Federal Trade Commission had uncovered a propaganda apparatus unexcelled in peacetime. Its mission, according to Thomas K. McCraw in TVA and the Power Fight, 1933-1939, was to paint public power as "Bolshevistic, socialistic, inefficient and generally odious." Hands-on vs. hands-off The resulting disgrace of the industry made a prophet of Sen. George Norris of Nebraska, a real maverick Republican who had long championed public ownership of the Tennessee River's vast hydroelectric potential. Building on Norris' groundwork, Roosevelt seized advantage from the economic crisis he had inherited and pushed through the TVA. Obama, by contrast, was so hands-off that his health care program wound up in the lap of another Nebraska senator, Ben Nelson — a renegade Democrat and former insurance company CEO. Lacking a public option, the Senate bill is the equivalent of a TVA that sort of inconvenienced the power companies but didn't actually make electricity. Oh, and because the government required everyone to buy electricity, the utilities reaped millions of new customers. With the TVA, passing the bill was the easy part. The companies then refused to honor their contracts with the government. Along with their publicists, lobbyists and citizens fronts, the utilities fielded a formidable legal team. The private interests ultimately lost the constitutional challenges, but tying up the TVA in court bought them time to massage the midterm elections and cultivate the 1930s forerunners of Blue Dog Democrats. At least the power industry had a brilliant spokesman in Wendell Willkie, whose folksy Indiana charm ("a simple, barefoot Wall Street lawyer," Roosevelt's deputy Harold Ickes griped) helped gain him the 1940 Republican presidential nomination. And the product he was selling — light itself — did liberate human beings from what one rural Alabama woman called the "prison of isolation and darkness and drudgery." What comparable claim can be made of today's health insurance industry? That gets at this administration's most remarkable failure: its inability to capitalize on widespread outrage against a vilified foe. Where were the advisers who would tell the accommodating Obama, as Norris urged Roosevelt, "For God's sake, do not give our laurels of victory to those whom we have defeated"? Or, failing that, where was the administration's version of the TVA's top-notch "public education" initiative, which might have explained the virtues of a public option to protesters who wanted the government to keep its hands off their beloved Medicare? Partly because of private enterprise's warnings of a wholesale government takeover, the TVA was a never-duplicated experiment. Yet Norris would say he could hardly believe the TVA had come to pass at all. Willkie's base "would destroy you in a moment, if they had the power," Norris warned Roosevelt, "without regard to the means if they were sure they would not be discovered." That is a truth the "post-partisan" Obama might be resistant to hearing. But FDR, however affable, embraced his killer instinct. His Congress lashed back with the Public Utility Holding Company Act to restrain the power trust. If today's Democrats do switch to an incremental approach and focus on regulating the monopolistic insurance industry, they should study up on that 1935 bill: According to McCraw, it "ignited one of the most intensive and scandalous lobbying campaigns in American history." Hearts, minds, votes Classic (as opposed to Tea Party) conservatism could be defined as a permanent campaign to "correct" the paradigm shift that was the New Deal. For what was at stake in the TVA fight was not just profits but also hearts and minds. When citizens see that government can improve their lives, as the TVA brought civilization to a benighted region, the political culture becomes less suggestible to corporate shibboleths. The relatively progressive TVA areas of Alabama produced the powerful Democratic congressman-turned-senator John Sparkman — Adlai Stevenson's 1952 running mate. But laurels are perishable. Last year, the representative from Sparkman's old district, Parker Griffith, became the first Democrat to defect to the Republicans. Perhaps if Obama had not given up on the public option, the Democrats might have made medical care a right as attainable as the TVA rendered electricity. And the late Ted Kennedy, avatar of health care reform, would not be yielding to the 41st Republican senator. Diane McWhorter, a member of USA TODAY's board of contributors, is author of Carry Me Home and A Dream of Freedom. |
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