06.18.09

Who is willing to lead, who has enough LBJ in them?

Posted in Around The Nation, Around The State, Commentary, Health Care, Road Issues, Transportation, Uncategorized at 11:03 am by wcnews

Transportation funding in Texas and health insurance in our country are two huge problems. Each problem needs the leadership of a politician willing to put their political skills to the test, and political life on the line, in order to get them fixed. It’s hard not to get frustrated wondering how these problems will get fixed and why it’s so hard to fix issues everyone agrees are problems.

With regard to health care there was an interesting line from a recent blog post by Robert Reich, The Healthcare War is Now Official, regarding what it will take now for Obama to get health care passed.

The question now is how much LBJ is in Barack Obama.

LBJ was known for doing whatever it took to get the votes to pass a bill. As LBJ’s biographer Robert Caro says, “There never was a surer touch. There never was more of an understanding of what exactly needed to be done to get this legislation passed”. What Reich is essentially asking is does Obama have what it takes to get the job done? Can he compel enough senators and representatives to pass health insurance legislation, that must be passed, in order to fix the health insurance problem?

Universal single-payer health insurance is what is needed in our country. We have a Democratic Congress, a majority of Americans would prefer a Medicare style option for health care, and a President who says it would be the best option if we were starting from scratch. And we still can’t even get it on the table.

But it’s not just the president and our federal government. Here in Texas we have miles and miles to go when it comes to transportation funding, and a governor that will do what’s needed.

Columnist Dave McNeely in a recent column had a great quote about the problem of getting transportation funding in Texas fixed, How active should state government be? It was regarding the attempt this past session to pass a stop gap funding measure, the so-called “local option gas tax”, to help out some of the major urban areas in the state.

Many legislators don’t want to vote for a measure — particularly one that involves new taxes — if they know there’s a good chance it’ll never become law.

Which means that legislators weren’t willing to stick their political necks out on a vote for a bill that was unlikely to be signed into law. Without an assurance from the governor that he would sign the bill into law the votes weren’t there to pass the bill. It was too risky for them to vote for a bill that was likely to be used against them by a future opponent.

It’s hard to see how anyone running for governor at this point that will have the enough LBJ in them to fix our state’s transportation funding problem. We know Gov. Perry is against any tax, not matter how justified it is. Kay Bailey Hutchison, for her part, has been crowing about her narrow opposition to tolling, “I oppose any effort to place tolls on existing interstate highways”. But she’s choosing her words very carefully. She is offering no plan to overcome the gap in transportation infrastructure funding, and she’s perfectly willing to toll any non-interstate highway.

As for the Democrats that have announced for governor so far we will just have to wait and see if either one of them, or anyone else who might join the race, will have enough LBJ in them to advocate for a strategy that would actually fix the transportation funding problem in Texas. The race for governor is a tremendous opportunity for a Democrat in Texas. Especially now that so-called “compassionate conservatism” is dead.

What’s left unanswered for both President Obama, and a potentially successful Democratic candidate for governor, is whether they will take the chance to do what is right and needed despite the risk to their political future. That’s the kind of leadership our country an our state need now on these two issues.

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