Strange Day
by paradox
“Don’t be calling me a liberal,” President Barack Obama said during campaign 2008, and despite the most absurd, ridiculous meme so desperately flung by hacks that Obama had spent the first 15 months governing from “the left,” Obama has lived up to his campaign statement extremely well. Republicans are at the helm at Defense and the Fed, huge tax cuts have been passed, a war ramped up, while perpetrators of terrible war and fiscal crimes whistle merrily along in seas of vast misery.
Yet all this time Obama has been advocating a very liberal thing, the alleviation of awful suffering in healthcare. Even here, though, the Obama has lived the campaign pledge almost as if he loathed the open liberalism such a process calls for: secret deals with pharma, dismaying kabuki with the public option, baffling and absolutely infuriating pre-concessions and inclusion of slimy Republicans, all of which greatly diminished the Democracy and the spirits of liberals everywhere.
I would ask with all the sincerity in my soul that my brother and sister Democrats try to understand and blast away all mental blinkers limiting their worldview to an extremely obvious truth: the healthcare bill to be passed today is a confusing mess, accomplishing approximately 25% of what it could have, a vivid reflection of an administration so blatantly not-liberal trying to accomplish a plain liberal goal. Naturally it’s been a tortuously long process that has shattered everyone’s patience in a tornado of disgust. That, too, would be an extremely wise truth well to be accepted in the Party. Sorry, today is not a day of triumph.
It is at least very much something, so the strident and persistent backers of the bill keep insisting, and this they are very much correct, there is a lot of good here in the base policy itself (excepting mandates, I wash my hands forever of trying to sell this politically insane idea, regardless of the possible policy merits). As the day wears on a far more valuable American political lesson of the process may inadvertently be cemented in, and as always Democrats benefit from a cancerous, vile opposition Party.
Faggot! the protestors hurled at Barney Frank, once again displaying behavior that demonstrates policy has nothing to do with it, the opposition simply hates the idea of inclusive liberals accomplishing anything for the little people. Pain and the future of children mean nothing to them.
Nigger! was spat furiously at civil rights legends Cleaver and Lewis, the foul creeping evil of eras long past so fervently kept alive in the only future we have. How this publicly happens in 2010 is a vivid reminder that attempting a fair insurance market viciously engenders a hateful senseless backlash that a vast majority of Americans will never accept in their lives, in any form.
So here we are, many liberals hurt and confused, not very much accomplished in an awful process, yet very much wanting to be loyal. Very much wanting to understand all the members of our Democratic Party, to be included, to have hope in a strange emotional mix of a day. Athenae of First Draft is a wise writer: if in fact 75% of the liberal wish list for healthcare had been accomplished, would that have been enough?
No. It’s never enough, and by God healthcare is not the only black mark on a long list of terrible liberal disappointments over the past few years, we’ve shouldered the shortcomings and moved on. Thus we shall today, accepting what we can because the future of faggot! and nigger! is something we could never, ever acquiesce to in some childish pique of obstinacy. Yeah I’m right about all of this, of course, totally. So?
Thus the vote will at last be held, the braying of well-earned accomplishment heard throughout the land, the deed done. There is so very, very much yet to do, and as Frank Rich pointed out so well huge lethal political mines still litter the political landscape, nothing is gelled for 2010, and if the same I’m-not-a-liberal approach is taken vivid anger at terrible injustice could cloud and obstruct how we got here, and how incredibly worse we all would be if in fact Republicans were in charge again. The little people of America deserve so much better than that.