Harry Dares to Win

Who would have thought during the teabagger-dominated doldrums of last July that a mere three months later Harry Reid would be videocasting to the nation between portraits of John F. Kennedy and Franklin D. Roosevelt appealing to citizens throughout the land to phone Congress and demand a public option in the health care mega-bill?

It really must be seen to be believed. Reid looks exactly like the kindly, slightly doddering pharmacist in my home town who would give us peppermints while our parents waited for their prescriptions. He hardly distinguished himself in opposition to Bush’s criminal wars, so to see him suddenly acting the role of People’s Tribune flanked by these symbols of old-fashioned liberalism is jaw-dropping.

I am among the estimated 8 million people who have downloaded the healthcare bill—more precisely, a summary version of its 1900 pages—from the congressional website, and I have been reading it with great interest. It is a fascinating document. After all the shouting and carping and threatening and craziness has died down, we may wake up to find that health care in the United States has taken a sharp turn in the correct direction. Not a perfect one, but a surprisingly radical shift in both tone and concept as well as content.

There is a lot in the bill to welcome, even applaud, which many others better versed than I will be parsing out. But my sense is that the momentum to pass some version of what is now on the table is probably irresistible.

Inevitably, the big companies and their shills will go to work immediately once it becomes law to find ways around its better provisions or explode them through legislative legerdemain. Some important provisions won’t take effect for years, and that gives the enemies of health and prosperity a lot of time to regroup. On the other hand, the Obamanian base is more inflamed and mobilized than anyone expected, and Harry’s metamorphosis is a direct result of it.

Anything can still happen, of course, but there is one possible outcome that ought to be stirring some deep anxiety among the ranks of the teabagger party. The Republicans have gone all out in a very public way to demonstrate their unshakeable, immovable opposition to this legislation or even the idea of it. They dug in their heels and crowed to the heavens that they were doing so in the most unabashedly partisan way, explicitly aiming their most poisonous darts at the Obama presidency in its cradle. They pretended that they had better ideas, but I challenge anyone outside a 100-yard radius of Capitol Hill to state one.

But what if the reform succeeds? What if people like it? What if, like the ban on smoking in Manhattan’s bars, the screamers and bawlers discover six months down the road that it was a good idea?

What if, like the civil rights laws of the mid-1960s, the entire country comes around to the idea that health care restructuring was an utterly necessary and overdue moral responsibility and that the Obama package more or less fulfilled it?

What if people are shocked to discover that their worries about how to pay for catastrophic accident or disease care have been lifted from their shoulders? What if they like the feeling that their insurance companies cannot railroad them into penury or that their total health costs are capped at a manageable maximum?

What if their employers no longer seek healthcare givebacks and ever-larger copays because the federal government has alleviated the annual premium increases?

The opponents of this reform have backed themselves into a serious corner and have bet the farm on whipping up popular indignation leading to Obama’s failure. They were uninterested in compromise and indifferent to nuance. Now that they have made their bed, it may turn out to be quite a narrow one.