Word: healthly
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...there was ever a good time for President Obama to make one of his lauded grand-slam speeches, it was last week. Obama’s hallmark health-care reform suffered a disheartening blow with the January 19th election of Republican Scott Brown to the Senate, thereby ruining the Democrats’ filibuster-proof majority. Coupling the election with a lack of progress on many of the other issues that comprised a major part of Obama’s campaign, a chorus of pundits, politicians, and voters immediately declared Obama’s agenda dead or, at least, majorly stunted...
...addition to his tenor and language, the substantive components of Obama’s speech merit praise. Many voters believe that Obama’s administration has been devoting too much attention to health-care reform at the expense of the economy. To address this concern, he wisely spent a significant amount of time focusing on the economy, the middle class, and the middle of the country. By doing so, Obama indicated that his priorities undoubtedly include job creation, education, and a more open government...
...just how credible those alternatives really were - their budget proposal, for instance, would have done away with Medicare. But the GOP came up with enough proposals of their own to give Republicans cover to vote nearly unilaterally against the stimulus, the budget, the climate-change bill and, of course, health care reform. (See a review of Barack Obama's first year in office...
...Their message, that the Obama Administration has been pushing job-killing legislation on everything from health care to global warming, seems to have resonated with independent voters who helped win Republicans the Virginia and New Jersey governors' mansions and, in a surprise upset, Ted Kennedy's old Senate seat in Massachusetts. "The President isn't having trouble because Republicans oppose his job-killing agenda - he's having trouble because the American people oppose his job-killing agenda," says Michael Steel, a Boehner spokesman...
...Ornstein says. "It works less well, ironically, when there are 59 Democrats in the Senate and the GOP loses the excuse that the Dems have enough members to do it themselves. The burden to join in governing is greater - and the risks of opting out are greater yet." Indeed, health care reform, if it fails, will have been brought down not by Democratic divisions as it was in the early '90s but by the loss of their 60th seat - and with it, their filibuster-proof majority. No wonder that Obama, in his State of the Union speech, also addressed Republicans...