I haven’t always agreed with the Obama Administration.
For the first year plus of this less-progressive-than-advertised presidency, I’ve watched attempts at bipartisanship met only with rhetoric, tail-chasing, and the embarrassing losses of American hearts and minds to a blindingly vitriolic and vapid conservative white-out.
Even recent attempts at conciliation, like those with the Republican House Causus, were met at every turn by a conservative scorched earth campaign, removing everything useful at the table to render any attempt at progress, much less compromise, null and void.
But tonight was this administration’s wake-up call.
This night, and in the weeks leading up to it, the President, this Democratic Party, was not about giving up to the conservative Eraserheads, but rather about the realization that there is no common ground left with this era’s Republican and that the only hope for reform is moving forward with the complex and thankless task of ending the human tragedy that is our nation’s current health care system.
It wasn’t just politics as usual. It was progressive politics at its best: a Black President and a Female Speaker of the House greasing the wheels to pass the most comprehensive reform the country has seen in more than half a century.
It, at most, insures millions of uninsured; It, at least, provides Rush Limbaugh with a lot of explaining to do when he refuses to leave the country as promised.
Squarely in the middle (if not a little to the Left), this passage signals something even more important: how the willingness of our President to fight the good fight, no matter what it costs in 2012, sounds the call for the rest of us to do the same.
Like a celluloid boxer beaten within an inch of his life, Obama and the Dems were down. He looks like a goner. But he gets up, he shakes it off, because it’s fight or die, ladies and gentleman. And you cheer. You cheer your ass off. Because it shows you what’s possible in politics. It shows you that, in your lifetime, Glenn Beck can walk this earth alongside a Congressional version of empathy, passion, and bravery. Not just a legislative extension in unemployment benefits, or tax benefits, or even marriage benefits; but for some, an extension of life. Yes. You. Can. Live. This bill says so. And we have the Democratic signatures to prove it.
Now it’s our turn. Wake up sleeping progressives. If Obama doesn’t stop working once he has his legacy-making reform, neither should we. This is our chance to look those Tea Party bigots squarely in their wee beady eyes and scream back, “Oh, I’m wrong? Well, you’re a goddamned sonofabitch!”*
*Thank-you, Sarah Andrews.
Han
April 13, 2010
You’re a brill writer. How are things in NC?