Tag Archives: obama

Health Care Passes

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Until the number “216” appeared on the screen last night, I wasn’t totally convinced it was going to happen. The fifteen minutes of voting were winding down and the tally was growing more slowly than I’d expected and I wondered if some Democrats were going to change their minds at the last minute.

But it really happened. Holy shit.

The Democrats have passed health care reform.

They did it!

If you had told me two months ago, after Scott Brown’s election and the Democratic disarray that followed, that we’d actually get here, I don’t think I would have believed it. I was depressed about politics and I was so sure that the wimpy Democrats would cave in like they usually did.

The turning point, I think, happened just ten days after Scott Brown’s election, when Obama met with Republicans in Baltimore and the session was televised live at the White House’s request. It was a great psychological boost for the Democrats — it was bold, it was different, and it showed that the Republicans in Congress were intellectually bankrupt and that Obama was not cowed. It was a prelude to the bipartisan session at Blair House a month later, where Obama was able to say to the Republicans: Look, many of the things in this bill are ideas that your party supported 15 years ago. You don’t want single-payer? There’s no single-payer. You don’t want a public option? There’s no public option. I’m willing to work with you, but you’re not willing to work with me. His performance gave congressional Democrats the leadership that Nancy Pelosi had insisted upon.

One of the things I admire most in Barack Obama is his capacity to learn from mistakes. He exercised poor leadership on health care last summer and fall, letting the debate go to Crazytown, and it cost him; had he taken greater charge of the debate, this health care bill might have had a public option, which will now have to wait for a future date. But he exercised much stronger leadership in the last two months, when everyone thought health care reform was dead. You could say it’s a wash: had he been a stronger leader back then, he wouldn’t have had to work so hard to save the plan. Would things have been different under Hillary Clinton, who said that we couldn’t afford to have a president who needed to learn on the job? Maybe, maybe not. But I’m so gratified to have a president who does know how to learn, a president who has flexibility and tenacity in equal measure. I’d rather have a president who learns on the job than one who thinks there’s nothing worth learning.

And Nancy Pelosi deserves great credit, too. I watched her closing speech last night and, to be honest, it was pretty dreadful. The Speaker is, ironically, not a very good speaker. But she’s apparently great behind the scenes, because she managed to hold a majority together with a few votes to spare.

As for the silly executive order that won over Bart Stupak and his caucus — an executive order that basically says that the law is the law — it seems like something out of The West Wing. I could just see Toby and Josh and Sam arguing with each other about how to win over the votes of these intransigent House members, and then Donna walks in and says something seemingly unrelated, and then a light bulb slowly goes on above Josh’s head as the camera closes in on him.

This really has been the stuff of high drama. But it’s not just about politics. This bill is going to do a great deal of good for millions of people. It’s the most significant social legislation Congress has passed in decades.

Obama just became a consequential president.

The Sixties at 50

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Today is the 50th anniversary of the Woolworth’s sit-ins in Greensboro, North Carolina. On February 1, 1960, four black students sat down at a Woolworth’s lunch counter and refused to leave without being served. While these were not the first sit-ins, they were the most famous, and they quickly spread across the South, and inspired a young generation of civil rights activists. Today, February 1, 2010, the International Civil Rights Center and Museum is opening in Greensboro.

This reminds me of something I was going to write about a month ago but forgot: for the next ten years we will be observing the 50th anniversary of the 1960s. The sit-ins (2010); the building of the Berlin Wall (2011); the Cuban Missile Crisis (2012); the JFK assassination (2013); the Beatles in America (2014); the sending of American ground forces to Vietnam (2015); the premieres of Batman and Star Trek on TV (2016); the Summer of Love (2017); the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy (2018); the moon landing (2019). For the next decade it will be one 50th anniversary after another, as the Baby Boomers relive everything that was important to their youth and the rest of us commemorate a pivotal decade.

It’s fun to relive history at the same speed as it happened. For some reason I remember the 50th anniversary of the 1937 opening of the Lincoln Tunnel, commemorated in 1987, when I was 13. At that age I was an avid comic book reader, and I associated the late 1930s with the golden age of comic books (Superman and Batman first appeared in 1938 and 1939, respectively). I remember waiting to drive into the Lincoln Tunnel with my parents, its massive, vaguely Art-Deco edifice looming before us, and imagining that it was the late 1930s and we were driving into crime-ridden Gotham City, just as Bruce Wayne and his parents drove into the city on that fateful night. It seemed like a dark, depressing time and place.

But 23 years have passed since 1987, just as 23 years passed between 1937 and 1960. If I had been born in 1923 instead of 1973, I would be reading about the sit-ins happening right now, and I would be thinking back to when I grew up during the Great Depression. Since the time I was 14, we’ve observed the 50th anniversaries of The Wizard of Oz and Gone With the Wind, Pearl Harbor, D-Day, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the creation of the UN, the birth of TV Guide, the Army-McCarthy hearings, Sputnik. Had I been born 50 years ago, I would remember those actual events, not just the 50th anniversaries of those events.

And this year you can follow a Twitter feed re-enacting JFK’s 1960 presidential campaign in honor of its 50th anniversary. Which makes me think: something like Twitter would have been incomprehensible 50 years ago. What kind of technology will we use to commemorate the 50th anniversaries of the big events of our time, like 9/11 or Obama’s election? Will we have holodecks or brain implants that will let us stand in Grant Park and watch Obama speak on Election Night, or experience Hurricane Katrina or the Beijing Olympics?

Our history was someone else’s current events, just as our current events are someone else’s history.