Yes they did.
On Sunday, the country found out the Democratic Party was still alive.
The pundits had left them for dead, Republican Party leaders had begun trumpeting their chances in this fall’s midterm elections and even some die-hard Democrats had started cringing every time health care reform was mentioned.
And lo and behold, on Sunday, Democrats in the House of Representatives managed to pass the most transformative piece of legislation to enter the House chamber since 1965, when Medicare was passed.
Washington broken? Please.
The vote signaled the demise of the GOP’s hopes to recapture a majority in either chamber, and it set the stage for future campaign rhetoric: “As Democrats, we said ‘yes we can,’ and the Republicans responded by shouting, ‘Hell no, we can’t!’”
Most importantly, the vote signaled the return of President Barack Obama.
Many had counted him out for the count, fearing that those who had warned that he was too young, too inexperienced, too green for the job had been right.
How wrong the naysayers were. Obama, ever the masterful Jedi, managed to inspire the Democratic House members on Saturday with a stirring speech evoking President Abraham Lincoln’s call that, “I am not bound to win, but I am bound to be true.”
While Democrats both won and remained true to their convictions, that outcome didn’t appear very likely for a long time.
As reform was dragged through the mud by special interests, illiterate tea-party “patriots” and media buffoons like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, Sunday night’s vote seemed like a dream gone wonderfully right.
But it is a mixed blessing.
Despite the bill’s bipartisan attempts — over the past year, the White House made an unprecedented effort to reach out to Republicans, and Republican amendments were included in the House bill — the Republican leadership only deepened the political divide in this country by allowing half-truths and misguided anger to flourish during this exhaustive national debate on a gamble of a political strategy aimed at making health care reform Obama’s “Waterloo.”
How craven, how unscrupulous, how cheap.
Even as the bill’s passage was imminent late Sunday night, the vitriol only began to peak. A Republican representative from Texas, Randy Neugebauer, yelled “Baby Killer” at pro-life congressman Bart Stupak during the House debate Sunday, and minority leader John Boehner gave such a stirring performance imitating Jack Nicholson in “A Few Good Men,” that he got the attention of Hollywood agent Ari Emanuel, the brother of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel.
On Monday, efforts to repeal the reform began, and GOP fundraising drives kicked into overdrive.
All of this was expected. And yet, the Democrats in both the House and the most important one sitting in the Oval Office stayed true to their convictions — that a family shouldn’t go bankrupt just because someone had the bad chance of getting sick, and that politics should be more than about simply helping yourself, but helping your neighbors too — and passed this historic reform bill, with it signaling the return of that little bit of George W. Bush we’ve all been missing: certitude in your convictions.
Matt Christ is a political science and journalism sophomore. His columns appear every other Wednesday.
