Passing health care reform is the Democratic Party's ultimate panacea, but failing to do so, and failing publicly, would be President Obama's "waterloo," as Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., opined earlier this summer.
With the recent departure of Sen. Edward Kennedy, passing meaningful health care reform is becoming more and more pressing each day.
Kennedy was revered by his constituents and colleagues for his ability to reach across the aisle. Yet he wasn't known as the "lion of the Senate" for always accommodating the views of his conservative counterparts, but for his ability to never compromise his liberal ideology.
With public approval of the democrats' signature issue slowly slipping each day, it appears the democrats are losing the war for the hearts and minds of the nation. They are not. Instead, democrats are losing a political war against a republican tag team whose cigar-smoking quarterback is calling the plays over AM radio waves, and whose cheerleader is a Facebook-savvy caribou-on-the-loose in Alaska with a highly active imagination about death panels.
"Democrats don't win elections. Republicans just lose elections," Terry McAuliffe, the former campaign manager for Hillary Clinton's presidential bid, once remarked. The republicans lost last year both because they were on the wrong side of the issues and because the majority of the American public didn't trust Barracuda Palin if Sen. John McCain pulled a Gerald Ford deplaning Air Force One. And while the democrats may have gained more congressional seats and sent the first black man to the Oval Office, they haven't had much luck winning anything since. One oft-cited stereotype of democrats is that they're elitist snobs who've never seen the trenches and can't find the time to put down their Moscot reading glasses while sipping their fair-trade coffee. It's a false stereotype, sure, but by refusing to engage and combat the false warnings of "ObamaCare," progressives stand to lose out on the issue of Teddy Kennedy's professional life to a group whose leaders mostly egg on each outrageous claim about Obama and his democratic colleagues.
The only elected democrat who's had the balls to stand up to any of his crazed constituents and explain that they are, in fact, crazed is Barney Frank - the openly gay congressman from Massachusetts and chairman of the House Financial Services Committee. When asked why he was supporting Obama's Nazi policies at a town hall earlier this month, Frank yelled, "On what planet do you spend most of your time?"
There are more and more people living on that planet, and democrats are doing little to nothing to bring them back to planet Earth. A recent Public Policy Polling poll found that 39 percent of Americans think the government should stay out of Medicare, which leads me to believe they don't understand that Medicare is a government-run single-payer program. Twenty-five percent of Americans believe Obama wasn't born in the U.S.
Meanwhile, the statistics on health care aren't getting any better: About 45 million people are uninsured, millions of whom are children, more than half of all bankruptcies are caused by burdensome medical bills and thousands die each year from avoidable illnesses because they couldn't afford regular outpatient medical care. Yet nothing is being done to lower these numbers because the insane faction of the Republican Party has been handed a bullhorn.
Perhaps education reform is needed before health care reform can ever be tackled.
Matthew Christ is a political science sophomore. His column appears on Mondays.
