Political Parties
The Democratic political party achieved one of its most impressive accomplishments since the electoral victories that won the White House and a majority in Congress in the March 21 passage of the legislation proposed by President Obama for providing an extensive overhaul of the American health care system. These programmatic changes are aimed at making health care services more affordable for those Americans who already have access to them through plans and more available to those Americans who are not or feel themselves not to be capable of affording health care plans. The scale of these changes aroused fierce opposition, mostly based in the conservative, right-leaning dominant quarters of the second of the United States’ two primary political parties, the Republican political party, which has made arguments based on both the practical ramifications involved in paying for the plan and the philosophical issues involved in supposedly altering the nature of American government.
Though both political parties in the past have called for wide scale revision of the overall United States health care system that would be based on the government taking a much stronger role in the providing of health care services, the increasing polarization into right and left stances on the part of both political parties has made it increasingly clear to advocates of such legislation that the political party likeliest to carry out these ambitious reforms was almost certainly the Democratic political party. Though the intensity of the competition to secure the legislation’s passage and the continuing presence of other nationwide problems such as continuing economic problems led to a loss of personal popularity on President Obama’s part and reversals for local Democratic political parties in regional contests, the overall effect of the final legislative victory has led to a renewed sense among Democratic legislators, activists and organizers of themselves as the still-dominant American political party.
One factor in the loss of prestige experienced by Republicans as a political party may lie in the tactics which they adopted in order to stem the bill’s approval. According to David Axelrod, a top political adviser to President Obama, the Republicans “wanted to run against a caricature of it rather than the real bill.” Notable instances of what some figures, such as Axelrod, would cite as a defamatory tactic being employed by the Republicans include former Alaskan governor and defeated vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s citation, through her Twitter account, of a provision in the legislation creating “death panels” for the extermination of the elderly. Many long-time political observers observed that they were surprised to find one of the major American political parties so apparently willing to misrepresent legislation to the American people proposed by the other. Bolstering the sense that the Democrats as a political party had emerged from the hard-fought contest with not only a legislative but also a moral victory, David Axelrod pronounced, “Now let them a child with a pre-existing condition, ‘We don’t think you should be covered.’ ” The balance of power between the political parties will long be affected.
