Yes, we now have a mild dose of health care reform that will admittedly do good for some citizens--plus enrich the insurance companies of the USA. And perhaps some marginal improvements can be made over the next few years.
But there's now plenty of canonizing of Nancy Pelosi (who seemed to follow the Rahm Emanuel playbook of pressuring people on the left such as Dennis Kucinich and Bernie Sanders--instead of gathering a few more Blue Dogs and even Republicans into the tent), plus overgushing from the I Want To Believe Obama-ites like THE NEW YORKER's Hendrik Hertzberg and film critic/occasional opinionator Roger Ebert (no, passing a heavily watered-down health care "reform" bill does not equal the day Barack Obama was elected President).
Nancy Pelosi, if she had really been All That, wouldn't have been so eager to strip out the public option from the final bill.
And we face a crossroads regarding the President and his future agenda. If US citizens want to see any real change, the pressure (without racial slurs, blue faces from breath-holding and tacky behavior from either the left or the right) needs to be applied to ensure Obama understands he's President of the United States--and not just an errandperson sent by multinational corporations and the Pentagon to keep doing the same old things in the same old ways.
We need real reform--not just incremental consumer-benefit crumbs that will pacify us when the White House thinks of putting another Guantanomo prison in Afghanistan and looks the other way at the abuses of Wall Street (i.e. placing big bets on continued domestic economy crumbling to make big money for a select few).
You're exactly right Terry. The Democrats have a great opportunity to do both the right thing and the politically expedient thing by genuinely challenging the banks and hedge funds and all the other financial institutions which got us into this mess. If they do that, the Republicans will forced to either go along, or stand up for the banks, which are more hated than even Congress right now. But does Barack have the guts to take that stand? I don't know.
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