Method
Upon coming to power, Obama extended his hand to his opposition, but the Republicans, with Obama's rival John McCain at the helm, preferred systematic and destructive confrontation.
This Christmas Eve’s symbolic vote on the American health care reform plan is illustrative of Barack Obama’s governance. He has succeeded where all the post-World War presidents have failed. One half-century after the establishment of Medicare, health insurance for elderly Americans, and of Medicaid, insurance for the poorest, he has instituted near-universal coverage. Obama knows that he does not have the right to presuppose the goodness and the perfection of men, and even less of voters and their Republican representatives. In all other countries, this rather modest plan would seem obvious and necessary. But in the United States, since the Reagan years, the state has maintained the image of an inquisitor. The public opinion still seems suspicious, due to the work of an unprecedented campaign of lobbies of health care profiteers - insurance companies, doctors and laboratories. Significantly, this reform was adopted along strictly partisan lines: All the Republican senators opposed the plan, contrasting the fundamental reforms of Johnson’s Great Society and the Civil Rights movement, which received the support of both parties. Upon coming to power, Obama extended his hand to his opposition, but the Republicans, with Obama's rival John McCain at the helm, preferred systematic and destructive confrontation. It is not certain that this tactic, while profitable in the short term, according to surveys, serves this party; if it desires to regain power, it should accept an ethic of compromise, as Obama has done.
About this publication
Based: Paris
Founded: 1973
Circulation: 134,800 (2006)
Owner: 39% of shares in the paper are owned by Edouard de Rothschild. A staff consortium holds an 18.4% stake, and the remaining shares are owned by Pathe, the investment group 3i and friends of the paper.
Launched in 1973 by Jean-Paul Sartre and a group of like-minded left-wing intellectuals, Liberation was aimed at the “1968 generation” – those who felt frustrated by the slow pace of social change in France and wanted a paper with an alternative outlook. What started off as a radical chic publication moved closer to the mainstream from the 1980s onwards, and by January 2005, when the banker Edouard de Rothschild became the main shareholder and invested 20m euros (£13m) in the title, the process of counter-revolution seemed complete. A restructuring plan proposed by Rothschild gave rise to protracted and acrimonious battles with staff, and many of Liberation’s most respected journalists left the paper.
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