The last week has been tough on President Obama.
Sure, the fact that Martha Coakley ran one of the poorest campaigns in recent history didn’t help, but that is of little solace to the President as he attempts to unify both the House and Senate around a health care policy mired in controversy, fear mongering and a catastrophic failure of logic now without the comfortable 60 seat majority.
The unfortunate casualty in this situation, however, is the average American who has been so focused on the health care debate, that they have failed to remember that the issues is actually with health care itself – not the politicians that angle for and against it.
Moreover, the latest ruffle (named Bernanke) indicates (at least as the Republicans would like you to believe) Obama’s misguided economic program – despite the fact that Bernanke was selected by President Bush and accepted by the Republicans at that time.
Whether consoling or not, it was G. W. F. Hegel who claimed that “the first formal condition of achieving anything great or rational… is to be independent of public opinion”. For Obama, the desire to strive for something better than the status quo has only been met by petty bickering amongst the “responsible few” who purport to represent the wishes of the many.
If, in time, Obama is able to work toward his vision of a better America, I can only hope that the few who stood on their soapbox claiming foul will shirk from that memory and fade into obscurity. For if it takes a principled individual to, as Hegel said, “express the will of his age”, he will indeed be the “great man of the age”.
Perhaps healthcare is not the will of this age, but won’t we all be disappointed if it becomes the reason we fail to find out what truly is.
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