"If you don't [stop Medicare] and I don't do it, one of these days you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it once was like in America when men were free." - Ronald Reagan
One of the biggest of "big government" social programs is, of course, Medicare. It pays for medical care for seniors and it is wildly popular. And in the interest of full disclosure: it is currently saving my mother's life.
Even anti-health care reform/big government protestors cherish it. At a testy health care town hall meeting last year in, of all places, South Carolina, an angry senior famously yelled at Rep. Robert Inglis "Keep your government hands off my Medicare!" Similarly, President Obama received a letter from a woman which read "I don't want government-run heath care. And don't touch my Medicare."
Medicare is so ingrained in the American sociopolitical fabric, so much a part of who we are as a nation, that it has become, it seems, post-partisan. Indeed, Republicans of all stripes now routinely cast themselves as staunch defenders of Medicare, but it wasn't always that way. As Joe Conason wrote at truthdig.com:
When the nonsense messages about “death panels” and assisted suicide are swept aside, the most consistent Republican argument in the health care debate is that reform will somehow endanger Medicare. The Democrats, who created Medicare and have protected the program from Republican presidents and legislators for the past five decades, were suddenly determined to destroy it with budget cuts. Only the Republicans, who opposed Medicare from the beginning, could now be trusted to preserve the program from the dastardly president and his allies in the congressional majority.As Conason notes, Republicans campaigned against Medicare from the word go. They screamed that it was a massive government takeover of health care that would lead to socialism; to Americans losing their liberty. Sound familiar?
Here was the final Senate vote tally in favor of the legislation President Johnson signed into law:
Democrats for - 57
Republicans for - 13
The yes votes came from the likes of Bobby and Ted Kennedy, Gene McCarthy, Walter Mondale, Birch Bayh and George McGovern. The nays came from the likes of Strom Thurmond. There was some support from moderate Republicans like Jacob Javits (New York, of course).
On the house side, 70 Republicans voted against it, including Gerald Ford, Donald Rumsfeld and Bob Dole, who bragged about that vote as recently as his 1996 presidential run.
Regardless, the measure passed and it was a huge win for progressives and for the country... and it came after years of bitter partisan fighting dating back to Teddy Roosevelt. It's not exactly a new thought: great victories often come at the end of great battles.
And how exactly do you think the current GOP would vote on Johnson's legislation if this were 1965? Think Eric Cantor would vote for it? How about Michelle Bachmann? How about John Cornyn or Richard Shelby or Jeff Sessions?
We all know how Al Franken would vote.
The message is as obvious as a child's "no duh": without liberalism, without progressivism, there would be no Medicare, no Medicaid, no Social Security. These kinds of programs, including Obama's health care overhaul, are what progressives have been fighting for - and conservatives railing against and demonizing - since time immemorial. Yet we now can't imagine what our country would be like without them.
This is the age old battle between progressives and conservatives: we claw to make progress, they hunker down to retard it. We end up improving in increments... and the status quo that conservatives are seemingly bred to defend changes, the goalposts move, generally in the more progressive direction. The idea of Medicare used to be the ceiling, now it is the floor.
So go ahead and pass health care reform, guys, and let 'em scream. In a generation or less, Republicans will be campaigning on its behalf like it was their idea all along and forced to lie - as Reagan did in his 1980 debate against Carter - about the rationale behind their previous opposition.
The make-up of the Senate in the 89th Congress was a whopping 68 Democrats and 32 Republicans. Those crazy, over-reaching, activist liberal Democrats ran roughshod over the minority and jammed through that massive government expansion into health care. Thank God they did. Can I get an amen?
I think the message is clear: if you think that Washington is broken, are tired of impediments to progress and want politicians to actually get something done, something positive to move our nation forward... then you need to learn the right lessons from history.
The answer is to give Obama more progressive Democrats, not fewer.
