Time to say a few things:
Health reform is important. The bills before Congress can make a difference for millions.
The President needs to win this one, soon. If the insurance industry can demoralize progressives over the holidays, the win comes on their terms. If progressives keep up the fight we could win.
The public option is not optional. It is our toe-hold on structural change.
Women and immigrants are more numerous and better organized than the turkeys who think we are wedge issues.
On the other hand, there is no organization that will swoop in and win this for us. Social justice, labor, women’s rights and other groups have been battered by 30 years of neoliberal economics and politics. Progressive political leaders in the Senate – Sanders, Brown and Burris - took their bows for talking up a single payer amendment that failed even more spectacularly than expected, and they ducked last minute appeals to them to cross Harry Reid and the White House by threatening a No vote.
Mike Huckabee is heading to Omaha to rally and revive the teabaggers. It won’t matter right now. Huckabee, like a lot of others, is building his lists and organization for other fights.
For those of us who think the next step toward health reform, however limited, should be at least a step forward and not a wholesale retreat on reproductive and immigrants’ rights, we will have to be enormously creative and persistent this week. Stay tuned..
Nice blog!!!!. You have done very good job. Keeps it up!!
ReplyDelete