Messiah complex

Riffing off this Paul Krugman post, let me just say that while Obama deserves all sorts of various criticisms for how things have gone done, he's the first president to get HCR even close to passing, much less this close to passing ever. Given the objective political conditions, that's not to be dismissed.

Point being, Obama has made all sorts of mistakes, but all politicians make mistakes, some discussions among the liberal blogs treat this as some sort of dangerous anomaly, and express disappointment that Obama isn't the savior who will take us to the promised land (i.e "the one", although Krugman has long been critical of Obama).  But look, HCR as it "should" have have been was undone by a shitty canidate losing a race in Massachussets of all places. 60 votes means you can pass stuff, but as we've found out, it means your hostage to any little hiccup in the process.

But! HCR can still pass. It's not dead. More to the point, its clear that its the liberal wing of the party that's hitting the brakes. And this is good! Because liberal members should be more vulnerable and responsive to online and general activism.  Therefore, again, the responsibility lies on us to pressure them to pass the bill.

Yes, there are other options we could do to advance forward, among them doing a medicaid expansion via reconciliation, as mentioned by Ezra Klein and endorsed by Digby. But here's a critical point, doing any of those things isn't mutually exlusive with passing this damn bill, and this bill is worth passing.

We need to pressure our representatives to pass the thing, and then use reconciliation to fix the bill.  Now that there are 59 votes, using reconciliation may be less politically charged and piss off the conservadems, whose votes on some things will still be useful.