This is what change looks like — President Barack Obama speaking after the historic healthcare reform bill was passed:
Tonight, after nearly 100 years of talk and frustration, after decades of trying, and a year of sustained effort and debate, the United States Congress finally declared that America’s workers and America's families and America's small businesses deserve the security of knowing that here, in this country, neither illness nor accident should endanger the dreams they’ve worked a lifetime to achieve. ( Full text here posted by the White House.)
Eloquent as ever, Obama has now achieved what he set out to do — bringing universal health care to America, one year, two months and one day after being sworn in as the 44th President of the United States.
Here is a flashback to that day, January 20, 2009: Pete Seeger and Bruce Springsteen singing This Land Is Your Land at Obama's inauguration — and Obama smiling during his swearing-in ceremony when Chief Justice John Roberts was the first to say: "Congratulations, Mr President!"
Barack and Michelle Obama smiling at the swearing-in ceremony.
I remember how Hillary Clinton also wanted healthcare reform. But when Bill Clinton was president, Republicans controlled the House.
Jonathan Chait in the New Republic writes:
Barack Obama has sealed his reputation as a president of great historical import. We don't know what will follow in his presidency, and it's quite possible that some future event–a war, a scandal– will define his presidency. But we do know that he has put his imprint on the structure of American government in a way that no Democratic president since Lyndon Johnson has.
The last two generations have no model for such a president. The only two other Democratic presidents of the last four decades are Jimmy Carter, a failure, and Bill Clinton, who enjoyed modest successes but failed in his most significant legislative fight. Obama, who helped pull the country out of a depression and reshaped the health care system, has already accomplished far more than Clinton. (This isn't necessarily Clinton's fault–he lacked the votes to break a Republican filibuster that Obama has–but the historical convention is to judge a president by what he and the Congress achieve together.) He will never be plausibly compared with Jimmy Carter.
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