Freed From Enslavement

How Obama Did It

(Daily Beast) – The president lost the ideological battle over health-care reform. But by spotlighting what average Americans need, he transcended the left-right divide, and earned his place in history.

By focusing the debate on individuals wrecked by our vicious and lunatic health-care system, Obama found his voice and gave his party courage.

Franklin Roosevelt’s opponents called him a communist and a fascist, sometimes at the same time. But in truth, FDR’s greatness stemmed from his indifference to ideology. Spurred by Eleanor, who told him of her wanderings through Depression-ravaged America.

Lyndon Johnson was a child of the New Deal. The Great Society was born, in part, from his experience as a young man watching how the Texas Hill Country was transformed when FDR “brought the lights.”

In the 1960s, Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan said that giving the poor and elderly health care violated the American creed. But LBJ, who had seen his Hill Country neighbors bent and broken by arthritis as the result of decades of near-medieval labor, wasn’t interested in what Friedrich Hayek said. He knew that in the real world, government-funded subsidized health care, like government-subsidized electricity, didn’t enslave people; it freed them.

In the ideological debate over health-care reform, Obama lost big. He finally began to win when he turned the discussion to Natoma Canfield, the Ohio cancer survivor forced to give up her health coverage as the result of rate hikes. Then he focused on Anthem, the California-based insurer that raised premiums by as much as 39 percent. Obama never fully overcame the public’s broader suspicions, but by focusing the debate on individuals wrecked by our vicious and lunatic health-care system, he found his voice and gave his party courage.

Obama, who had seen life at America’s margins–who had seen suffering in Chicago’s housing projects, as Eleanor Roosevelt saw it in the Dust Bowl, and Lyndon Johnson saw it in the Texas hills. “Who’s been on the ground, in the field?” asked Sister Regina. “Who knows the struggles people have to deal with?” The nuns know, and so does the president of the United States. And that has made all the difference.