Katrina Vanden Heuvel

Katrina Vanden Heuvel American progressive is an journalist and political analyst, who is editor and publisher of The Nation, the oldest opinion magazine in the United States. A columnist for the Washington Post, she positioned herself to the left of Barack Obama, and wrote, in March 2010, that progressives need to organize against his Administration's "tepid" changes.

Health-care reform is historic, surely the most significant social legislation passed since Medicare. But it is a flawed and conservative bill, akin to the reforms Mitt Romney championed as the Republican governor of Massachusetts. It gives the insurance companies millions of new customers with no public option or Medicare buy-in to help put a lid on costs. It sustains the outrageous law that prohibits Medicare from negotiating bulk discounts for prescription drugs. It sustains the exemption of insurance companies from antitrust laws.

This reality -- a historic reform that isn't strong enough to get the job done -- is characteristic of the Obama administration, a progressive-centrist government in a moment that demands fundamental reform.

She wrote that "Real reform is frustrated because the administration sets the bar too low", and cited "so-called moderates" such as Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), Ben Nelson (D-Neb.), Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.) and Evan Bayh (D-Ind.) damaging reform, leaving progressives as

... in a dilemma. We can't abandon reform to the rabid right, but we don't believe the reform going forward will do the trick. That's why progressives must organize independently, not as an arm of the administration. We need to push the administration to be bolder than it is.

She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and on the boards of the Institute for America’s Future, Institute for Women's Policy Research, Institute for Policy Studies and World Policy Institute.