Political Horizons for July 26, 2009

• By MARK BALLARD
• Advocate staff writer
• Published: Jul 26, 2009

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A gathering on the sidewalks around the Baton Rouge federal courthouse quickly turned stormy last week.

It originally was planned as a discussion about efforts under way in the U.S. Congress to change how health care is provided and paid for in America. It quickly evolved into a conflagration over the circumstances of President Barack Obama’s birth.

Clusters of about 125 protestors crammed the narrow sidewalks arguing that Obama was not qualified to be president because he could not prove he was born on American soil.

The shouting back and forth between the two groups intensified. At one point, Baton Rouge police Lt. Elton Brown physically stepped between an Obama opponent who was waving his fist in the faces of Obama supporters.

Someone yelled out, “You get them people out of here.”

Brown responded, “They have a right to be here too.”

As if that was the signal, Brown’s officers cut a gap into the crowd and segregated the factions, some of whom continued yelling over the cordon of police.

Though the state of Hawaii has certified that the president was born in Honolulu in 1961, the point for many — often goaded by conservative talk radio hosts and Internet bloggers — is that Obama can’t produce an official “long form” birth certificate, which hospitals routinely issue. Therefore, he must rely on state certification, as do millions of Americans — including me — not born in a hospital or arriving on a day when the hospital had run out of the forms.

This is the kind of democracy that led some of the country’s leaders in 1787 — the guys we call the Founding Fathers — to revise the country’s system of government. James Madison wrote that “the people” are too often diverted by a demagogue’s appeals to fears and vanities for the sole purpose of acquiring personal power. This argument is what led the founding fathers to craft a government that balanced powers of the people and the government. Theirs is an idea, as is often said, that has lit the world for more than 200 years.

Obama, generally, wants to provide subsidies for people and employers to purchase health insurance, penalize those who don’t and expand the government’s safety-net insurance in order to provide the 47 million or so uninsured Americans the coverage they need to receive almost any kind of medical treatment.

His opponents counter that a system that is propped up by taxpayer subsidies would undermine competition with private insurers and lead most consumers to government-run health care, which would become extremely expensive and provide substandard service.

Widespread public worries about Obama’s proposal have led many Republicans, in the words of William Kristol, one of their national columnists, to “go for the kill” and break a popular president by defeating him on a high-profile issue.

This state’s most prominent Republicans have joined that hunt.