Here’s a linky to Google Scholar and the text of the first two chapters of the book.
From the first chapter:
Since the politician’s first principle is to avoid taking on any more organized opposition than he has to, the first principle for those who want to influence politicians is to organize. With this elementary rule in mind, millions of people in the United States have banded together in some two thousand organizations and have sent their men off to Washington — lobbyists who represent everything from the National Association of Manufacturers and the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations to the Camping Club of America and the Southwestern Peanut Shellers Association. For every member of Congress there are ten lobbyists, and the most modest estimates of what they spend in the course of working for or against specific pieces of legislation that interest their employers run to more than a billion dollars a year.
…
The struggle over government health insurance raged back and forth across the country for more than a generation. It cost the AMA and its affiliates and allies something on the order of fifty million dollars, it gave the Association a reputation that would not be envied by the Teamsters, and it left political wreckage that may not be cleared away for more than another generation … "Medicare was the greatest social innovation since the passage of the original Social Security Act of 1935," Senator Clinton P Anderson, Democrat of New Mexico, who was co-sponsor of the bill, said shortly after it passed. "The doctors claimed the fight was over government control of medicine. That wasn’t it at all. The fight was over whether decent medical care is a basic right–like the right to food, shelter, clothing and education. The people and Congress decided that it was. I guess it could properly be called the fifth human right."
I think Anderson and Harris have given us our marching orders. If we want to influence politicians, organization is a must. And decent medical is a basic human right.
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thanks, bct. recommended.
Thanks, BC. In keeping with the theme of plus ca change…, I strongly recommend downloading and listening to this 1961 debate , on CBS’s Face the Nation, between labor leader Walter Reuther and Dr. Edward Annis of the AMA on legislation to fold hospitalization benefits into Social Security. The same scare tactics we hear against single payer (and against the far more capitulatory public option concept) were in full force nearly 50 years ago.
The clip is doubly depressing not just for the familiarity of the attacks on public health insurance but for the contrast between the depth and vigor of Face the Nation in that day and the vapidity of the modern-day descendants of such shows.
Parenthetically, I listened to this mp3 last week while taking a bike ride from Park Slope, Brooklyn, out to the Rockaway peninsula. A day or so later, I learned that Chuck Schumer likes to take precisely the same bike ride.
What I wouldn’t give to buttonhole the Senator on the Marine Parkway Bridge on health care reform.
Schumer gets out in the public and connects to people, unlike their other (new) senator Gillibrand who just calls people. Dems *should* be connecting instead of following in Rudy’s footsteps of yelling 9/11 all the time.
We need to support good candidates like Schumer!
Schumer was instrumental not only in shilling for Gramm-Leach-Bliley but years before, in the House, for the thrift deregulation that gave way to the S&L crisis.
He was an ardent booster of the Iraq war and remained so years after other Democrats were apologizing for it. He’s been an apologist for torture and promulgator of the bogus “ticking timebomb” narrative. He actively supported Mukasey for AG and Kerik (Kerik!) to head DHS.
His so-called compromise proposal on the public option has been attacked even by, in my estimate, the most effective public-option whip on the internet. He sneered and fumed at single payer protesters following the arrests at the Baucus hearings.
Man of the people my ass. Shaking hands and buying pie at the local green market do not constitute substantive citizen engagement.
He brags that he took the lead on getting Freeman to withdraw. Don’t forget him clowning about with the Princeton cap at Alito’s appearance at the Judiciary Committee, either. Schumer is a schnook.