With momentum, and only with momentum, can we usefully think past the short run.
Hang on a sec. Is it my imagination or did we just segue to climate change? Weren't we talking about health care reform?
I did mean climate change. Let me explain a bit more and I think it will be clearer:
In the middle run, it has to be understood that the health-care fight is a battle, not the war. The war is for across-the-board reforms of a substantial nature. Here's where the mobilization of those new to politics, especially the young, will be crucial. Victory over health care would be intrinsically good for much of the population, but the young care least. That's shortsighted. They need to understand that defeat over health care stops Obama in his tracks and batters the prospects for any further reforms--including the ones they care most about. And so--
3. Momentum, momentum, momentum. [See above] Does this make sense?
Better, thanks. Anything you'd like to add, Todd?
Just this. It wasn't empty rhetoric, Obama's or anyone else's, to say that electing him was no panacea. Leadership is indispensable but can't be self-sufficient. Movements open space, and politicians then figure out how to improve their prospects by occupying that space. Along the way, movements have to learn to live with disappointment, a gap between the desirable and the actual, because this is the way of the political world. Thus, to hold out for single-payer, and to denounce anything short of it at a time when it's politically impossible to pass, would be enormously destructive.
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