One election doesn’t make a mandate.
If Obama doesn’t have a mandate after a landslide win a year ago, The GOP doesn’t have a mandate because of a Special Election in Massachusetts, and 41 seats in the Senate.
The same people in Massachusetts, who voted for Scott Brown, voted for Barack Obama. Those mostly independent voters are fed up with nothing getting done in Washington.
Yet, the Democratic Party is running away from health care reform, faster than light shed on a cockroach. Would someone remind the Dems that they have already passed health care in the Senate.
To start over on health care because of a special election in Massachusetts is ridiculous. To take it slow and piece by piece doesn’t make sense at all. You have debated over the bill for months now, the CBO has scored it, it bends the cost curve, and reduces the deficit while covering 30 million more Americans.
The Republicans choose to sit it out, not because they disagreed with what was purposed, because they refused to even take a seat at the health care reform table. They wanted to hand Obama a defeat, plain and simple. Not because they had a plan to do health care better, but because they wanted to look like Washington D.C. outsiders for the upcoming midterm elections. A brilliant plan to win an election, but what does that do for health care?
This obstructionist behavior was the GOP magic bullet, it caused Democrats to compromise with idiot senators like Ben Nelson, and Blanche Lincoln, to get a bill passed. It prolonged the debate and made Washington D.C. look like well, Washington D.C.
However, this GOP win doesn’t change the fact that health care needs to be accomplished, and it certainly doesn’t mean that you start all over again. Starting over again falls into the same trap. The trap of slowing everything down and making you look incompetent, like the Dems have looked for the past year.
All while the GOP look like the outsider complaining about politics as usual, while they use every political trick in the book to make it look that way.
But nobody cares what they are doing to stop you. They care about results.
So pass that health care bill and get moving towards easier to comprehend reform. The American people will thank you later, when they can get health care easier and cheaper all while, not going bankrupt if they get ill.
As Paul Krugmann wrote today, incremental steps to pass health care is like a one legged stool.
When that is complete, go after the banks, and Wall Street, make them pay back the people. Let the Republicans, support the people who blew up the housing bubble. Watch the tea party split, because Ron Paul will support banking regulation, while many of the GOP will try to fight the reform, because it has come from Obama, and they would not have realized their waterloo as of yet.
Do this while talking about the economy, and how the Energy Technology Era can help bring back American jobs, and manufacturing, all while making us more energy independent and thus less attached to the foreign dictators of the Middle East. Show how cap and trade mitigated acid rain, and how it will lessen our addiction to non-renewable energy sources, while helping add jobs.
To begin this dialogue and reform that is so important to the future of America; a momentum must be started with a passing of health care legislation, which shows the American people something has been done.
