Obama Strikes Back

The legislation of the century passed without the help of a single Republican. Never have the differences between America’s two political parties been so hate-filled. The president pulled off a political coup and has dropped the role of the great conciliator.

Over 220 years ago, Thomas Jefferson, America’s apostle for the message of democracy, said everything needed to understand his country in the year 2010. “The tyranny of the legislature is really the danger most to be feared, and will continue to be so for many years to come,” Jefferson wrote in a letter to James Madison, who would be his successor as president of a still very young United States. He didn’t fear government, which he considered controllable; he feared a Congress whose tyrannical powers he almost envied.

And Barack Obama, Jefferson’s 41st successor to the office, found his experience with Congress very similar. Thanks to their merciless majority, Democrats pushed through their health care reform package, giving their president an irrevocable victory and, in some measure, exacting revenge for their years of humiliation and marginalization as the congressional minority party. The legislation of the century, passed without one single vote from the Republican minority; the chasm between America’s political parties has never been as harsh and hate-filled.

Shrill congressional disagreement is not unusual in the United States. “Nothing is so irresistible as a tyrannical power commanding in the name of the people,” Alexis de Tocqueville, French political philosopher and early analyst of American opinion wrote in his study of the American system, adding that its power derives from the fact that, “while it exercises that moral influence which belongs to the decisions of the majority, it acts at the same time with the promptitude and tenacity of a single man.”

Therein lies the dual face of American democracy: The majority is ruthless in dealing with the minority — but that’s the only way to explain how the system can renew itself and, after a democratic election, march off in a new direction with equal euphoria and radicalism.

The world has been witness to these extremes in the recent past, from the ruthlessness of a Republican congressional majority dealing with a Democratic president’s sexual escapades to its tone-deaf responses in connection with torture and unjustifiable war, the regeneration of a political system in the midst of an election cycle and now to the a minority using tyrannical means to thwart the legislative process in an attempt to defeat the most important legislation in America in fifty years.

Barack Obama has now pulled off his political masterstroke with what de Tocqueville so juicily described as “despotic taste and instinct;” his first and possibly most important accomplishment — perhaps even his only permanent accomplishment. The vote in the House of Representatives marks the end of Obama’s quest for reconciliation.

This president will no longer try to be the bipartisan paterfamilias of the nation — he can’t go on like that. Obama had to make clear to his own congressional majority that it was either him or the opposition; those were the alternatives. Obama decided in favor of his own political survival. Had he given up his reforms or further watered them down in an attempt to get bipartisan support, he would have been seen as soft and indecisive. And Americans no longer support soft leaders.

U.S. Health Care Reform — A Returning Hint of “Yes, We Can.”

Health care reform is a great political accomplishment, a monument that won’t be permanent until it has endured new elections and many legal decisions. Politically, it has renewed the president in the Democratic camp and given his rhetorical randomness and generosity a firm foundation. Many Americans, and not just Republicans, oppose the idea of government health insurance in the mix with private industry. Such decisions are best left to the Americans themselves, but Obama’s determination will now command respect among them in the near future.

Obama was able to put through a social reform in America that may go largely unappreciated because the majority of beneficiaries — the large number of those uninsured up to now — don’t vote unless they’re convinced. The congressional show of strength has thus far cost a year, many voices and a sacred myth. In return, Obama, if he doesn’t know it already, will have gained important new knowledge: America is not a democracy of consensus. The nation lives on the tyranny of the majority and it is able to absorb political extremes thanks to its great size and clumsiness.

All that doesn’t make laws durable or reforms permanent, and that’s all the more reason the president deserves recognition for not trying to avoid the dangers. The cost of his insurance policy will become apparent not quite three years from now.