24 June 2009
 
The Swimming Pool

(The White House Press Briefing Room in better days- Photo Truman Library)
 
I fell asleep by the pool in the lowering light. When I awoke, the kids were playing a full contact game of “Marco Polo.” You know the one, and it is impossible to get away from it in the summer.
 
It involves some sort of echo-sounding by the player who is the designated “Marco,” who with eyes screwed tight, attempts to herd the other players into a position of disadvantage and ultimate tagging. The game can go on for months, as you know.
 
Groggy from the sun, I stepped off into the deep end and felt the coolness of the water wash away the cobwebs. In this case, the game had advanced to the point where Mildred, the former DO operative, was advancing in her old-lady stroke toward the shallow end of the pool and collided with the Marco who was advancing with blind grim purpose.
 
Mildred must have been a college graduate when she joined the Agency in 1950, and she thus would be in her late seventies or early eighties. She is very circumspect about what she did and where she was posted in those days, but she must have been a looker, and I have my suspicions about what she might have been able to accomplish on the collections front.
 
She wears a bathing cap and an old-fashioned suit with a floral skirt attached, and I feel protective. Not about her- I am afraid what she might accidentally do to the children if startled into a moment of her old tradecraft.
 
The unpleasantness was short-lived, and the Polish Guard took no note of if, but that was it for Marco Polo that afternoon.
 
I talked to the Doc for a while after that, and Jen and the World’s Cutest Baby floated by for a while, but as I paddled and the hands of the clock passed six I was about ready to get upstairs and find out what the President said on the first big-deal press conference.
 
The bloom is not quite off the rose on he administration, not yet, but this has been a challenging time since the Iranian election. His natural inclination has been to not feed the xenophobia in Tehran and Qom, but he is getting pressure from the right not to look like a wimp. The press conference was supposed to be in the Rose Garden and address that, and the continuing crisis about the health care reform initiative and probably some fallout from the Metro crash.
 
The press conference was supposed to be in the Rose Garden, a cool summer backdrop with the kids playground as a backdrop, but the clouds have parted over the city and the bright sun was going to play hell with the make-up and the camera angles. They had to move the thing inside, to the refurbished Press Room, which may have accounted for the somewhat testy atmosphere.

Despite the recent refurbishment, the place is claustrophobic on the best of days, having been built atop FDR’s pool. If you have been behind the podium there, you will know exactly what I mean. I got a chance to stand there one time and became immediately tongue-tied, though there was no one asking me a thing at all.
 
President Roosevelt needed his exercise, just like I do, and he commissioned the pool in an area of the White House that had started as a laundry room.
 
Goodness knows there has been plenty of laundry aired in the room since its most recent conversion.
 
I said good night to Mildred as I walked out of the Big Pink pool complex. She didn’t ask me any questions, but she did nod at me from under her big straw hat. I guess watching the amount of sun she gets accounts for her state of preservation, or maybe it is just the tradecraft.
 
The President probably would have preferred being in the pool, too. It is becoming apparent that the American public is pretty comfortable with the idea that we get something for nothing. The cost of the health care reform is so staggering that it ranks with the bail-out bills. The wars are continuing to exact their tolls, too, and it is pretty clear to everyone hereabouts that between the stimulus packages, supplemental war spending and health reform there is not a great deal of flexibility short of taking a bath.
 
The Bush Administration accomplished something profound with their round of tax cuts. They rolled back the level of pain associated with funding the welfare state. Reinstituting it is going to e a heck of a chock, like Mildred swimming into the middle of Marco Polo.
 
I think we will be startled when it happens, even though we know it is coming. The President is a smart guy, and he obviously knows it, too. He must have been kidding when he said that a Federal plan would pose no threat to the private sector insurance companies. This could only work if we really took on the challenge and instituted something like Britain did in 1946, when they established the National Health Service.
 
That would mean junking all the private plans, taxing job-related health benefits and raising general taxes to make up the difference.
 
It could probably be done, and the President knows that. He also knows that there is no stomach to go that far, and without major surgery the cost will break the bank.
 
He said health care was the number one threat to the economy, and he is right. Of course, he is only right if we do something stupid.
 
There is not enough desire to do the thing right, and so we will wind up some another half-assed half measure.
 
See, most of us have already worked something out, and I don’t get the sense that anyone is going to start marching for the opportunity to pay for someone down the block who hasn’t.
 
Maybe I’m wrong, but no one is going to start rioting about health care. Figure the odds.
 
Copyright 2009 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com