Republicans’ Dream of Failure

We can blame the Republicans for a lot, but let’s not be vague. Since Barack Obama’s first day in office, Rush Limbaugh and Mitch McConnell, the GOP’s leader in the Senate, showed their hand: Their number one objective is to make the 44th fail. This idea is elsewhere very present in the spirit of their voters. A CNN poll revealed that 61 percent of Republican voters “hoped” that Barack Obama would fail in 2010 (a feeling shared by only 27 percent of the general American population). This is a fact unique to American history. Whenever we look back to the past, we can’t find a trace of a time where a party and its media ally were actively hoping for its country to fail.

Recently, journalist Timothy Egan recalled that when the first satellite sent into space exploded in 1957, no Democrat cheered and hoped (even strove) to put an end to the space program. When Medicare, the health care program for seniors, had some failures at the beginning, the Republican Party didn’t invest its future on its failure. In 2013, the Republicans have only one idea: the failure of the United States.

They hoped that the economy, driven into the ground by the Bush-Cheney clan, would not recover. They hoped that the automobile industry would go bankrupt. They prayed for job creation to stagnate and for the price of gasoline to explode. Appalling.

If health care had a terrible launch that will soon be over, it will at least improve in a considerable way the lives of those 50 million Americans who currently don’t have health insurance. Who can take pleasure in the failure of a program that will change their lives?

And the program is starting to work. In California, 2,000 people a day get health insurance thanks to Obamacare; ditto for New York. In Kentucky, Mitch McConnell’s Republican home state, 56,000 people have already signed up. In an article, Timothy Egan notes that, thanks to health care reform, he will save more than $200 a month on his family’s insurance. And the Republicans hope that reform fails? That demonstrates the party’s destructive lunacy. If there is something Americans hate above anything, it’s pessimism.

The Republicans could catch up in the next election. In that case, we pray for their failure. America would then be the winner.