Perhaps the president heeds my musings – OK, perhaps not. Still, I was gratified by Obama’s emphasis at the health care bill-signing ceremony on Tuesday on a theme I stressed here last week (March 20 and March 15): That passing the health legislation can be a powerful antidote to cynicism that renews our resolve that we can still do great things, solve big problems.
Obama closed his address with a ringing peroration on that theme. After passing the health care bill, we still face many challenges, the president said. But we face them “with a new wind at our backs. Because we know it’s still possible to do big things in America. Because we know it’s still possible to rise above the skepticism, to rise above the cynicism, to rise above fear…”
To rising applause, the president went on: “There will be difficult days ahead. But let us all remember the lesson of this day and the lesson of history: that we as a people do not shrink from a challenge; we overcome it. We don’t shrink fron our responsibilities; we embrace them. We don’t fear the future; we shape the future…. That’s who we are.”
And now that David Broder has cited that peroration and Obama’s “steadfastness” in the health care battle in today’s column, the president’s renewed call to idealistic action will take its rightful place as part of the conventional wisdom, just as everything that appears in Broder’s column does (see link to Broder column below).
Link to Broder\’s column on health reform
Still, like many fine pieces of rhetoric, the president’s words were more poetic than realistic, more about who we’d like to be than how we’ve actually behaved. The sad truth is that in recent decades we have evaded the large challenges posed by issues such as energy, carbon control, immigration, health care and the nation’s fiscal future much more often than we’ve confronted them as initiatives to address such issues have collapsed amid bickering and political gridlock.
That makes it easy to be cynical about the capacity of our institutions. More than that, the incompetence of such misadventures as the Bush administration’s disastrous invasion of Iraq and utter failure to perform basic tasks of bank and financial regulation over the last decade makes it easy to assume that our institutions aren’t up to any serious challenge. Sadly, such failures have, in the eyes of much of the public, undermined the legitimacy of strong state action even as the collapse of the bubble economy of the deregulation era and the gathering crisis of global warming and declining energy supplies cry out for a strong public response.
But as I’ve argued before, that kind of cynicism about public action wasn’t always the order of the day. Throughout the last century, the nation regularly mounted very successful large-scale, public programs to address far-reaching public problems. Yet over the last 30 years or so that aspect of our national experience has been relentlessly elided or derided by powerful free-market fundamentalists who emphasize the coercive character and possible failings of state action but often seem utterly blind to the frequent failings and coercions inherent in what Ronald Reagan liked to call “the magic of the marketplace.”
The laissez-faire bias of the extended Reagan era helped suppress the capacity of our institutions to act. And, as David Leonhardt reminded us in his wonderful Wednesday column “In Health Bill, Obama Attacks Wealth Inequality,” that bias also did much to add to income inequality and the concentration of wealth in this country. The Clinton admininistration extended the earned income credit for working families substantially but the health bill is a much more powerful progressive vehicle. Since much of its funding comes from a payroll tax hike for those making more than $250,000 per year while most of its benefits will go to the working poor, the health law represents a long-overdue, large-scale step toward distributional equity (see link below to Leonhardt column).
Link to Leonhardt\’s column on health reform and inequality
The health bill is so momentous because it represents a chance to turn the page from the cynical laissez-faire attitude of the Reagan era and recapture our ability to shape the future in far-reaching ways.
That’s what makes the bill so historic; it also suggests that the stakes involved in implementing the bill effectively are very high.
If the legislation miscarries, the political fallout will damage much more than our health care system. But if it succeeds, the health reform precedent promises to open new paths for change.
