Alex Massie Alex Massie

The Most Significant Democratic Triumph in 40 Years

Presidents have been trying to cover the uninsured since LBJ sat in the Oval Office. None have succeeded. Until now. It doesn’t matter whether one approves of the bill or thinks it likely to work or not, one should be able to recognise the legislative achievement and, hence, the scale of this Democratic victory. It’s probably the most significant progressive-inspired* piece of legislation in 40 years.

So how did it happen? A bit of luck, some arm-twisting, a lot of perseverance from Nancy Pelosi and the rest of the House leadership and, with the benefit of hindsight, a spot of GOP blundering. There aren’t, I suspect, 216 members of the House of Representatives who actually like this bill, far less 216 who could vote for it on the merits. But, as I suggested the other day, when substance runs into politics it’s politics that usually wins. And so it was on this occasion too. (See Nate Silver’s analysis too.)

Republicans, in retrospect, sealed their fate when it became clear that they weren’t interested in doing a deal and when they decided that killing healthcare could a) revitalise the party’s spirits, b) perhaps be the springboard for winning back the House in November and c) above all do terrible damage to the Obama presidency. At that moment this ceased – if it had ever been – being a question of health care or health insurance reform and became a brutal, bloody battle for political survival.

The GOP argument was, in the end, as odd as it was contradictory. In terms of the politics of the matter, the party argued that the bill’s unpopularity (some genuine, some the product of some measure of scaremongering) ensured that, whether it passed or not, Democrats and the Obama administration were stuck with it and that this would, in the end, be the beginning of the end for both Pelosi and the President.

Simultaneously, however, they had to suggest to wavering Democrats that abandoning the bill was both a matter of good conscience and something that wouldn’t really hurt the Democratic party.

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