I spoke tonight at the beginning of the health care week being put on by the Penn Democrats. With the news that Harry Reid had decided to put a public option in the bill he intends to bring to the floor, it was a good night to be speaking. I gave a different kind of speech than usual, putting our campaign for health care reform in the context of the revival of progressive politics. I’ll write that up soon.
But on this very good day for our campaign when we have seen some inkling of success coming from our hard work over the past fifteen months, I did want to post the following reconstruction of my closing remarks.
I said at the beginning of my talk that the election of Barack Obama was the start of the rebirth of progressive politics in America. And I said that to keep this revival going, we have to keep working hard to enact progressive public policies beginning but not ending with health care reform.
Having President Obama in office is necessary to enacting these public police but it is not sufficient. Indeed, the President has not been as helpful to the health care campaign as we would have liked, particularly with regard to the public option.
It has been your grassroots movement that is responsible for the embrace of the public option by the House and Senate leadership. Your work is the main reason that progressive champions for health care reform in Congress have stepped forward to insist that the their leadership push the public option forward. And your work is the main reason that our progressive champions can count on moderate and conservative Democrats not backing away from their tentative support of health care reform.
I like Barack Obama a lot. But he is not my hero. I’m too old to take any politician as my hero. Politicians live to break our hearts. They have to. They get elected to office by being cautious and stay in office by not going too far too fast. How fast and far they are willing to go is determined by how hard we work in organize ourselves to push them, and the other politicians whose support they need, to do what’s right.
So Barack Obama is not my hero. The people who make up this campaign are my heroes. The staff of the HCAN campaign in Pennsylvania and Washington and of our labor partners, who have been working endless hours to build our movement in Pennsylvania, they are my heroes.
And so are all of you who have come tonight, and on other nights, in cities and towns all over this state, who have rallied and marched and phone-banked and canvassed and sent letters and emails and done a thousand other things day after day to build pressure on Congress. You are my heroes. You are the ones who have made the victory to which we are now clearly heading possible.
And if you are new to this campaign, there is still time for you to become a hero as well. Because we are not done yet. The insurance companies, and their allies in the business and conservative communities have not given up. They are going to keep fighting, by fair means and foul, to protect the unjustly privileged position they now hold. And they are formidable adversaries. For they still have resources we can’t possibly match—unless, that is, you are willing to keep organizing and struggling for six more weeks until finally, after a hundred years of trying, we enact legislation that creates a guarantee of quality, affordable health care for all.