Twenty years ago, when he was trying to persuade Bill and Hillary Clinton that universal health care was a politically unrealistic goal, the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan repeated one insistent warning: Sweeping, historic laws don’t pass barely. “They pass 70-to-30,’’ he said, “or they fail.”
Four years ago, when he was trying to persuade Barack Obama that he would pay a terrible price for jamming health care reform through a reluctant Congress on a partisan vote, White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel begged his boss to settle for a vastly scaled-down plan.We now know what happened: Obama’s bill made history — and caused all-out political war. For this president, that’s the price of doing business in a hyperpartisan culture. No one in Washington can really pretend the game is any longer on the level: Over the past few years, the Supreme Court stepped in to settle a presidential election by a 5-4 partisan vote, Obama’s predecessor launched a reckless war in Iraq on specious grounds, and a Republican-led House held the attorney general in contempt for the first time.
was it that all before him were not as dedicated to the idea or weren't really up to the fight however it was he did it and did it as a two time elected first Black President in America and his name is Barack Hussein Obama, those are the facts.
Obama tried — for far longer than most of his liberal allies wanted — to get a bipartisan health care bill. Its centerpiece — an individual mandate to buy insurance — was a Republican idea, first pushed in Congress 20 years ago by Sen. John Chafee of Rhode Island.That meant nothing to the current Republican congressional leadership, which vowed to block Obama’s bill from the start. “If we’re able to stop Obama on this, it will be his Waterloo,” said then-Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), now president of The Heritage Foundation. “It will break him.”Obama might have shown greater legislative or political finesse at any one of several points along the way. But his basic alternative to passing the bill the way he did would have been to accept his lot as another liberal loser and abandon hope for 20 more years.
although the right wing will continue to deprive him of his propers the world knows and it just makes them look small and vindictive. i don't think failure has a place in Pres. life past, present or future, they will try to spin history but it's so much of it that's documented the stench of sour grapes will give them away each and every time.
