Yesterday, the President compared the drive for health care reform with a previous generation’s success in putting a man on the moon.
To paraphrase: Some doubters and cynics thought that President Kennedy’s goal was foolish and unrealistic, but the American people proved those cynics wrong, showing what we as a nation are capable of when we put our minds to it.
So too healthcare. Now is the time to act. The time for talk and nay-saying is past.
If the President thought more about his analogy, the work of his predecessors, and the institutional capacities of Congress, he might reconsider his efforts to jam complex health care legislation through Congress as early as this fall.
In 1957, the Soviets put Sputnik into orbit. JFK announced his goal of putting a man on the moon in 1961. Neil Armstrong took his first steps in 1969.
Naturally, a program as complicated as the Apollo missions took many years to complete and encountered setbacks along the way.
Yet somehow, President Obama looks at this example of a near decade of deliberate innovation by NASA and finds inspiration in the abilities of Congressmen and Senators to rework one-seventh of the American economy before they head out for vacation?
The President might have been more realistic if he had referenced another journey to space in his push for health care reform. If Congress manages to pull such sweeping reform off, it will have boldly gone where few Congresses have gone before.
May the force be with Obama. He’s going to need it.
8 responses so far
1 MFarmer // Jul 24, 2009 at 8:33 pm
It’s more comparable to LBJ’s Great Society. If we can improve healthcare like we ended poverty, all will be well.
2 ottovbvs // Jul 25, 2009 at 9:14 am
……….It’s probably more difficult because it principally involves people not machines……..machines are inanimate……they go where they are told to go and do it over and over again……people don’t
3 sinz54 // Jul 25, 2009 at 10:01 am
After Sputnik, there was bipartisan support for beating the Russians to the moon. Notice how this goal was backed by four Presidents from two different parties: Eisenhower, JFK, LBJ, Nixon. There was no widespread opposition to this goal in any Congress of that time period either.
Whereas there is nothing bipartisan about the health care reform bill that Obama is trying to push through. It really does resemble how LBJ rammed Medicare through a Congress controlled by his own party, after having won a landslide electoral victory. And yet, even that took 18 months to pass.
Social Security wasn’t passed in the first year of FDR’s administration either.
What Obama is trying to do–totally remake health care in America in just the first 7 months of his Administration–is unprecedented.
4 ottovbvs // Jul 25, 2009 at 10:14 am
sinz54 // Jul 25, 2009 at 10:01 am
“What Obama is trying to do–totally remake health care in America in just the first 7 months of his Administration–is unprecedented.”
……..Basically true and 75% there……..and addressing other huge issues too like two wars/occupations, the greatest financial/economic crisis since the thirties, the collapse of the US auto industry, rebuilding our international standing, cap and trade, but lets’s talk about Henry Louis Gates or Obama’s birth certificate.
5 sinz54 // Jul 25, 2009 at 12:18 pm
ottovbvs sez: “Basically true and 75% there”
Maybe Obama should do what Bush did, and hang a banner reading “Mission Accomplished.”
As an engineer, I saw many a project that was supposedly “75% completed”, remain stuck indefinitely struggling with that last 25%. That’s because it’s tempting for a project manager (whether it’s a computer project, the Iraq War, or ObamaCare) to keep picking the low-hanging fruit that’s easy to do, in order to maintain a facade of progress. You do the 75% easy things and boast you’re “75% completed.” But eventually all the low-hanging fruit has been picked, and the hard problems still remain unsolved. Then the “stuff” really hits the fan.
In the case of ObamaCare, the “stuff” hit the fan when the Congressional Budget Office admitted that ObamaCare wasn’t going to reduce costs, but increase them. How you give generous health care to tens of millions of the currently uninsured while reducing costs for everybody else is a conundrum that so far hasn’t been solved.
Liberals actually thought that the prospect of universal coverage would be so alluring to the public that they wouldn’t ask about the cost or the effect on the currently insured. That’s the same mistake Clinton made in 1993.
6 ottovbvs // Jul 25, 2009 at 1:45 pm
sinz54 // Jul 25, 2009 at 12:18 pm
“Maybe Obama should do what Bush did, and hang a banner reading “Mission Accomplished.”
……….He’s not that stupid
7 sinz54 // Jul 26, 2009 at 10:56 am
ottovbvs sez: “He [Obama] is not that stupid”
He was stupid enough to launch into a totally inappropriate, racially inflammatory, rant during his last presser.
And Obama is now learning the hard way that this isn’t 1933. The problems with the U.S. economy have NOT convinced the public that the nation has to move sharply to the left on just about everything. They’ve had 70 years of experience with government incompetence and waste at all levels of government, that they are going to need a lot of convincing that ObamaCare isn’t “just another one of those” government programs.
Unfortunately, it is.
8 ottovbvs // Jul 26, 2009 at 6:37 pm
sinz54 // Jul 26, 2009 at 10:56 am
“He was stupid enough to launch into a totally inappropriate, racially inflammatory, rant during his last presser”
………..A rant?……if you say so
You must log in to post a comment.