The process was wrenching, and tainted to the 11th hour by narrow political obstructionism, but the year-long struggle over health care reform came to an end on Sunday night with a triumph... NYT editors
The process was worse than wrenching. For anyone who watched the debate on CSpan, it was a steady and shameless drip-drip of po-faced, smark-alecky lying on the part of Republicans who, almost without exception, sold their souls -- 45 seconds at a time.
Paul Krugman cites Obama's last minute, extraordinarily intelligent appeal to House members and contrasts it with Newt Gingrich's petty, empty comments.
Obama: "We are not bound to win, but we are bound to be true. We are not bound to succeed, but we are bound to let whatever light we have shine."
Gingrich, a man who has spent much of his life floating on the surface of civic service, has compared health care reform to the Civil Rights Act which "shattered the Democratic Party for 40 years." Krugman asks: "Who in modern America would say that L.B.J. did the wrong thing by pushing for racial equality?"
The Republicans' answer is clearly, " We do." After all, they are a party in which -- for 40 years -- moral considerations have been trumped by political considerations every time.
Watch CSpan. See the banality of evil with your own eyes. Krugman writes:
Let’s be clear: the campaign of fear hasn’t been carried out by a radical fringe, unconnected to the Republican establishment. On the contrary, that establishment has been involved and approving all the way. Politicians like Sarah Palin — who was, let us remember, the G.O.P.’s vice-presidential candidate — eagerly spread the death panel lie, and supposedly reasonable, moderate politicians like Senator Chuck Grassley refused to say that it was untrue. On the eve of the big vote, Republican members of Congress warned that “freedom dies a little bit today” and accused Democrats of “totalitarian tactics,” which I believe means the process known as “voting.”
On the other side were people like Marcy Kaptur who gets it after all. Kaptur, an anti-abortion hold-out made a last-minute switch to a "yes" vote. She saw the other side of a what goes into a woman's decision whether to have a child.
"This is actually a bill about life for all American families," Kaptur said. "No longer will any woman have to wonder whether she can bring a child to term because she can't afford it."
Okay. We know who the moral winners are in last night's final vote. Who will the political winners be?
After the bitterest of debates, Mr. Obama proved that he was willing to fight for something that moved him to his core. Skeptics had begun to wonder. But he showed that when he was finally committed to throwing all his political capital onto the table, he could win, if by the narrowest of margins.
Whether it was a historic achievement or political suicide for his party — perhaps both — he succeeded where President Bill Clinton failed in trying to remake American health care. President George W. Bush also failed to enact a landmark change in a domestic program, his second-term effort to create private accounts in the Social Security system.At the core of Mr. Obama’s strategy stands a bet that the Republicans, in trying to portray the bill as veering toward socialism, overplayed their hand. ...
... Mr. Obama’s gamble is that what worked for Johnson and President Franklin D. Roosevelt will ultimately work for him. Once Americans discover that they can no longer be rejected for insurance for pre-existing conditions, he is betting, or that they can keep their children on their own insurance plans longer, the more they will come to appreciate the effect of the changes on their day-to-day lives. ...NYT
For sure. But then there are the unknown unknowns. We can expect nutcases out there to do something nasty and unexpected. Other issues ("health care reform"? that's so yesterday) will dominate cable and network TV narrative on "inside the Beltway." Those who are dedicated to a steady attack on Obama will continue to attack. But he may turn out to be the political winner as well as the moral winner.
The flip side of Obama's perhaps naive belief that he can win Republicans over is his ability to show them up. Americans are confused about the plan, but they are not confused about the man. By large margins they trust Obama more than they do the Republicans to produce rational solutions to the country's problems. In the past month, he exploited his mastery of policy detail, his pragmatism, his focus on effectively alleviating the suffering he spotlighted, and his willingness to stake his political future on getting this bill passed to the utmost... Andrew Sprung at xpostfactoid (h/t Daily Dish)
Later in the evening, Sprung added to his post: "As the President said tonight, after the bill passed: 'This isn't radical reform... it is major reform. It doesn't fix everything that ails us but it moves decisively in right direction. This is what change looks like.'"
Therein lies a key message for progressives who have come to believe that the health care legislation contains some kind of betrayal. But then progressives may not be any more comfortable with "process" than are members of the Tea Party -- or anyone else in between, for that matter.
