Health Insurance Reform: The Democratic Win in Perspective

By Fubara David-West



President Obama and the Democrats were the big winners yesterday, as they finally heard the message from the vote of the last elections: lead! If the president had learned the lesson from that message, in the first few months of his presidency, he would have realized from the word go, that it was a huge mistake, to basically give the Republicans a veto over his most important domestic policy initiative.

His willingness to lobby hard for bipartisanship, after the electorate handed the presidency, the House and the Senate to Democrats, merely convinced his political opponents that he was weak; and once they arrived at such an estimation, there was really no compelling reason for them to cooperate with him, in order to make his presidency successful.

The final act that got the Democrats over the finish-line: a parliamentary maneuver that avoided the vise of the super majority rule in the Senate was always available, but it was left untouched until the frigid intransigence of the Republicans, who were acting like victims of groupthink, made it crystal clear that they were not opposing health care reform because of any deep-seated philosophical issue. Theirs was a simple mission of burying the presidency of a man whom they considered to be weak. By the final act, which guaranteed this victory, President Obama showed the Republicans that their estimation of him was quite mistaken.

The Republicans have now been placed in a situation where they have to rethink their strategies. They were too quick to imagine that they could easily dust themselves off from their resounding defeat at the polls in November 2008. It is not yet good morning in the Republican Party.

I thank you.

Fubara David-West.
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