There is an old rule of politics, from the old politics - before the discourse was played out like a food fight every night on cable television. The rule goes something like this:

When all else fails, resort to principle.

It is what this President has done with health care, what he has done across the first 14 months of his administration. This is the President he was supposed to be.

Maybe the worst part of this debate - worse than the ugliness and epithets we witnessed in rallies against this bill in Washington on Saturday - is this: Maybe we have reached the point where no one believes that any politician, even the biggest we have, could actually do something for the right reasons. And that is not just ugly. It is obscene.

...

You don't have to like this bill, you don't have to like Nancy Pelosi, you are allowed to think that Barack Obama should have spent more time over the past 14 months talking about the people who are out of work in America rather than focusing on the ones without health care in America.

But do even the worst crackpots, from the Tea Party movement and anywhere else, think that Obama would have put himself on the line this way if he didn't believe in what he was doing?

Of course this has been a wretched partisan process all along, with deal-making along the way that would have made the Gambinos blush. Of course this isn't a perfect plan, because there is no such thing, because the original imagining of Medicare wasn't perfect either.

"I've read back on the debate surrounding the Medicare Act," Rep. Anthony Weiner said yesterday. "Medicare was supposed to be socialism, too. It was going to shut down our economy. Forty-five years ago you got the same b.s. arguments you hear today."

"But even his critics would have to admit this is a risky thing he is doing," Weiner said. "And something he should be honored for doing, not attacked."

On this one, he is the President he was supposed to be, the President of change you really can believe in. Barack Obama hasn't always been better than the opposition. This time he is.
Source: DAILY NEWS