The Progressive President Speaks: About Damn Time
28 June 12
o hang your fortune on chance.The president finally has found the six-word answer on why health-care reform - any health-care reform - couldn't wait until the second term, or on a jobs package, or on a Wall Street bailout, or something else that tickled Rahm Emanuel in his funny places. People were getting sick because they couldn't afford to stay well. People were dying because they couldn't afford to get well. This is a moral imperative with which every industrialized nation on the planet, except this one, had grappled successfully. And today, in reaction tothe Supreme Court's decision largely upholding his own admittedly flawed attempt to come to grips with it, the president was more eloquent, and more convincing, than he's been at any point during the prolonged - and occasionally ridiculous - fight over the law itself. He talked about all those American citizens who had to worry "not just about the cost of getting sick, but the cost of getting well." Those people, he said, shouldn't be forced to "hang their fortunes on chance."
Contrast that with the Romneybot 2.0, meeping away on a balcony in Washington, forgetting that the Supreme Court also handed Governor Romney a considerable vindication of the (immensely popular) program he put in place here in Massachusetts - the one in which he called the individual mandate "a personal responsibility issue" - and talking in bloodless banalities about what he would keep and what he would throw out, and tossing out all kinds of meretricious figures about what's going to happen, and never really coming to grips with the millions of people who, at the moment, at least, do not have to hang their fortunes on chance.
The popular opinion among the pundits is that the president should now walk softly on this issue, or that the issue will fade as the campaign rolls on. I think that would be as big a mistake as his pulling back in the face of the manufactured outrage of 2010 was. The president should talk about this every day. He should pin the Massachusetts program to Romney's forehead. He should force the issue out of economics and into an argument about the general welfare (And he should, for the love of god, stop talking about our need to pay down The Deficit.) He got a win today. So did the people who no longer have to hang their fortunes on chance. To hell with repeal-and-replace. The president should run on maintain-and-improve. His defenders back when the law passed kept saying that the ACA was worth passing because it was the first step toward the progressive goal of universal coverage. If he really meant what he said today, that should be the president's position now and forever. We'll see how many fortunes the system will force to hang there on chance.
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