Leadership

I pushed pause on the TIVO and backed up my recording of the network news to hear again what I thought I had just heard….Yep!  There was Chuck Todd standing in front of the White House saying that President Obama was going to speak to a joint session of Congress next week on health care and his advisors were hoping it would help boost his poll ratings!   Good Grief!  Is that what this is all about??  Poll ratings?

We need to stop for a moment and get our bearings.  This whole question of health care reform is not about anything less than a central moral question.  It’s not about money, it’s not about politics, it’s not about polls.  It is simply a moral issue questioning whether we are a country where we take care of each other or not.  Many things we debate have clear policy issues that have several sides one may choose to be on, but with health care, there are no sides. 

Suppose you were in a hospital bed, just having come through a life saving operation while the fellow two floors up from you needs the exact same operation but doesn’t have the money or the insurance to have it.  Isn’t there something wrong there?  Shouldn’t we as a nation of liberty and justice for all find a way to care for each other in the most basic way of all, to deliver a healthy life to our citizens?

And yet here are the conservatives and Republicans with their holier than thou attitude spreading myths and lies to discredit the notion that we all have this  responsibility to each other.  You have heard all the garbage coming from them for the last month. 

Let me ask you something….why would they want to see any reform at all?  It is not in their best interest!  Most are receiving political donations from insurance companies or drug companies.  All of them have no desire to allow a progressive administration to have a success—that would discredit their handling of the country for the last 8 years.  If they can make this President and his administration fail on this signature issue, then their re-election chances improve next year and –glory be!—they will have crippled Obama so their chances in the next presidential election will be soooooo much better!  They have even had the unmitigated gaul to publicly proclaim that fact!

And where is President Obama?  He is behind the magic curtain trying to pull the strings and nudge Congress to come up with the plan.  That is a fool’s errand if I ever saw one.

Correct me if I am wrong here---last November 4th a substantial majority of the country voted for this man to do some things he said he would do: institute Universal Health Care, end the war in Iraq, end the war in Afghanistan, end the abuses and insults to our Constitution and our individual rights, have a transparent government that would wear the shiny patina of ‘change’.

We all were ecstatic that night as we watched the crowd in Grant Park and saw the hope, the relief and the pure joy of expectation in the eyes of the people there.  I know it was a reflection of the same elation I felt sitting in my den.  We were all one in that moment of great possibility.  Where are we now?

We expected Barak Obama to be the leader he said he was.  C’mon, Barry!  Grow a set and take the bull by the horns and LEAD!  Show us that this Health Care thing is a MORAL issue that we all must get behind.  Stop worrying about your polls and make all of us, and especially the jerks in Congress, realize that there is no alternative to doing the right thing.  Lay out what you want to do in specific terms and make us all believe we must do it.  Channel Harry Truman, for God’s sake!

That is the kind of leadership I voted for…..didn’t you?