Monday, Spring Break: Health care.

I’m reminded that last summer Anne and I drove an hour south from our summer rental in Lakeside, Michigan to Wakarusa, Indiana to greet President Obama and do battle with the Tea-baggers over health care.

Obama was speaking to workers at a plant in Wakarusa, 12 miles south of Elkhart. We were still full of enthusiasm coming off of Obama’s presidential victory and we thought that national health care, with a pubic option if not single-payer, was within reach.

Last night’s vote was not what we had in mind. The bill that was voted on falls so very short of what we had optimistically rallied for nine months ago.

The sight of Bart Stupak, standing before the cameras claiming victory in excluding a woman’s right to choose from the bill with a promise of an executive order from Obama was sickening, even though I knew that Obama has never had a strong and clear voice in support of reproductive rights.

And yet.

What decent person cannot be happy that the right-wing is furious this morning. Who cannot be happy that those who marched through the House office building hallways yesterday screaming “nigger” at Black elected officials and “faggot” at Gay elected officials, and whose actions were encouraged and defended by the leaders of the Republican party, are furious this morning.

I read Paul Krugman this morning in the NY Times and I agreed with him on this point,

And on the other side, here’s what Newt Gingrich, the Republican former speaker of the House — a man celebrated by many in his party as an intellectual leader — had to say: If Democrats pass health reform, “They will have destroyed their party much as Lyndon Johnson shattered the Democratic Party for 40 years” by passing civil rights legislation.

Think about what it means to condemn health reform by comparing it to the Civil Rights Act. Who in modern America would say that L.B.J. did the wrong thing by pushing for racial equality? (Actually, we know who: the people at the Tea Party protest who hurled racial epithets at Democratic members of Congress on the eve of the vote.)

The Health Care Reform passed last night is not the bill I wanted. I am disgusted, if not surprised, by the failure to spine up on the part of the Democrats to make the bill what it could have been.

But never miss the chance to take some satisfaction in kicking a little tea-bagger ass.