Continue in the faith, stable and steadfast? (St. Paul by Comper; photo: Lawrence OP)

Continue in the faith, stable and steadfast? (St. Paul by Comper; photo: Lawrence OP)

After reading Sheryl Gay Stolberg’s piece in the New York Times on the “liberal revolt on health care” that is stinging the White House, I have come to the conclusion that President Obama might be in need of a new communications director.

“People need to put this in perspective,” Dan Pfeiffer, Mr. Obama’s communications director, said in an interview on Thursday. “Two years ago, the Democratic Party would have done anything for the opportunity to pass a health care reform like this. Let’s realize how far we’ve come, and how close we are to making history.”

I call bullshit.*

No one that I know of in the Democratic party ever dreamed of passing health care reform “like this.”

The GOP, OTOH, often dreamed of forcing millions of new customers onto the insurance companies, dreamed of killing any notion of single payer or a public option or expanding Medicare, and continues to dream of making it even harder than it already is for a poor woman to get an abortion.

But hey — at least we didn’t strip out SCHIP from the bill.

Yet.

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* Yes, pastors occasionally speak like that — especially those who grew up near dairy farms. Even St. Paul spoke like that on occasion, though the translators generally clean him up for popular consumption (see, for example, Philippians 3:8).