Did a reporter from a big-city newspaper really write this?
“Health care reform depends entirely on holding as many of the Democrats together as possible,” says Larry Sabato, a political scientist at the University of Virginia and author of The Year of Obama: How Barack Obama Won the White House. “That's how he gets a scaled-back health care bill passed. The big bill is dead.”
Sabato said Obama's call for Democratic unity must be matched with a private warning to anxious Democrats that inaction would be more dangerous than action — a lesson learned in 1994 when the GOP took control of the House and Senate for the first time in 40 years after the Democratic-led chambers failed to pass health care reform.
Wow, talk about a total rewrite of history here. I remember very well the last time a Democrat president tried to push through a takeover of one-seventh of the American economy. It caused just as large of a swell of discontent then as it is causing now, although I don't remember right offhand anything like the town hall demonstrations. And guess which party opposed the whole thing? Thaaat's right...the Republicans. And here we are, less than 20 years later, having the media's go-to academics telling us that the party who opposed a health-care takeover got elected into the majority because that plan did not get passed. I guess they're counting on Americans' ignorance of history being at the point they barely remember what happened two months ago, much less more than 15 years ago.
Secondly -- and you politically active gunnies know exactly what I'm about to say here -- up until now, at least, even those in the media have acknowledged the overriding reason for the Republican blowout in 1994 was -- wait for it -- the passage of the Clinton gun ban. None other
than Bill Clinton has acknowledged as much:
The NRA had a great night. They beat both Speaker Tom Foley and Jack Brooks, two of the ablest members of Congress, who had warned me this would happen. Foley was the first Speaker to be defeated in more than a century. Jack Brooks had supported the NRA for years and had led the fight against the assault weapons ban in the House, but as chairman of the Judiciary Committee he had voted for the overall crime bill even after the ban was put into it. The NRA was an unforgiving master: one strike and you're out. The gun lobby claimed to have defeated nineteen of the twenty-four members on its hit list. They did at least that much damage and could rightly claim to have made Gingrich the House Speaker.
One wonders what those who are promoting the "failure to pass healthcare reform led to the Republican takeover in '94" narrative would say to this when confronted with it. Unfortunately, we'll probably never find out, since real journalism seems to be a thing of the past.
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