It was a strange experience Sunday night watching the lead-up and vote on HR-3590, the US House of Representatives name for the health care bill.
At this point, there have been so many twists and turns to the story, so many months of arguments and counterarguments and analyses and revisions, so many worst case scenarios promoted as truth — if we don't do something now, health care costs will bankrupt us all; if we pass this bill, the government will throw us out of the plans we love, and saddle our grandchildren with untenable debt — that it's hard to know what exactly what rough beast this might be that slouches toward our Bethlehem.
And I have to say, during the three hours I caught of 45-second, one- and two-minute speeches back and forth from Republicans and Democrats, I longed for the visceral dynamism and interaction of Question Time. The same themes, same stories rehearsed ad nauseaum, this was death by a thousand sound bites.
The Democrats had the better story, returning again and again to the idea that this bill was not about politics, but about sick kids and Grandma Alice and the poor folks down the street and your son that brave self-employed entrepreneur.
They praised the bill for ending insurance discrimination against those with preexisting conditions, for providing insurance for 32 million citizens who cannot currently afford it, and for its value to women, whose medical insurance tends to cost more. Said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi: 'After passing this bill, being a woman will no longer be a pre-existing condition.'
The Republicans, on the other hand, bemoaned the bill for not having listened to the people's concerns and, stealing a page from the Liberal Party's playbook, for the huge burden that it will place on future generations. (The struggles of the tens of millions Americans in the current generation who have little or no health care went unnoted.)
Republican opposition leader John Boehner began his comments, 'I arise with a sad and heavy heart', as though at a funeral, and spoke of how the Democrats had broken trust and strong-armed the deal, claims that seem unjustifiable from the facts, and yet certainly speak to the fears of a large segment of the US population.
He and his colleagues also attempted to position themselves as friends of the insurgent small-government, throw-the-incumbent-bastards-out Tea Party