The Thrill of Victory; the Agony of Defeat.  Or The Fierce Urgency of Now; the Audacity of Hope.  One or the other.  It was in part a way to rationalize or make an advantage of a vote for less executive or legislative experience.  There are other ways to dissect those two phrases and what they mean — a sort of harking back to an argument against the claim for “Gradualism” throughout the first part of the twentieth century as a means to halt any civil rights advancement, for instance.

You know about that well forwarded email by Lou Pritchett believe it or not about how “you scare me”?  The one where near the beginning we get “don’t know your background” (and then, contradictorily enough, rolls into what he believes to be his background)?  That was a Lou Pritchett Problem, not a Barack Obama problem.  You do know that he was in the Illinois state Senate, and that his career there is a part of the public record?  You do know that the newspapers in Illinois covered his votes and politicking?

Chicago Tribune-November 17, 1997
UNIVERSAL HEALTH CARE PROPOSED
Invoking the name of Cardinal Joseph Bernardin, a group of physicians and legislators Sunday announced they will seek an amendment to the state constitution to guarantee health care coverage for all state residents.
 Despite the popularity of Bernardin, however, such a measure would face overwhelming odds against winning approval. Previous efforts to institute universal health care coverage in Illinois have failed over the years, primarily because of the massive tax increases that would be required to fund such programs.
The proposed “Bernardin Amendment” would use prose directly from the cardinal’s 1995 pastoral letter to establish health care as a basic right of Illinois citizens and require the General Assembly to enact a plan that permits everyone in Illinois to obtain decent health care on a regular basis by 2002.
“What a fitting way to honor Cardinal Bernardin, who was a voice of conscience, courage and compassion in the health care dialogue,” Dr. Quentin Young, president of the American Public Health Association, said at a news conference at the James R. Thompson Center in Chicago.       
Young noted that more than 1.3 million Illinois residents–about 11 percent of the state population–are uninsured. According to Voices for Illinois Children, some 300,000 children also lack health care coverage.
Rep. Michael Boland (D-East Moline) said he will introduce the measure in the Illinois House in January. State Sen. Barack Obama (D-Chicago), he said, has agreed to introduce the measure in the Senate.

But we’re a long ways from there.  Theoretically it’s covered in the Pritchett penned essay, but the then state legislator now President has since trimmed his sails again and again, arguably right into the presidential campaign and right into this Senate session and is still being pegged as “Socialist Radical” by LiebermanNelsonSouthernDemocratBunchies — the first one’s goal seems in large part little more than to gratify himself with this sort of limelight:

 Reaching the point where the Bill can only be measured as either better than the current system by default, or not.  What it is is a Rube Goldberg device designed to swerve through the “World’s Greatest Deliberative Body” — an artificial device birthed by unholy artificial legislative structure, not organic policy designed to meet the needs of the people.  And what is insuffrable about it is that is projecting to an Obama administration after a sort of customary and unremarkable two or three seat loss in the Senate in 2010 — imagine a 57 to 43 Democratic advantage.  That is still a heafty party majority, and yet unless it clears the way to a sort of “‘Moderate’ Republican” some cover for the same sometimes unremarkable policies that doesn’t exist right now with the Democrats whose being is marked by a definition of “bipartisan”, it becomes more gridlocking.  These are due to, I would suggest in part, the thought process of Harry Reid, as well what a Barack Obama imagines he wants to engage with.  At the moment I’d almost want this thing to be scuttled and a small bore bill of three relatively tepid by tangible reforms to fall into place as a “Health Insurance”

OR is the pressure point looking something like?:

Now, granted the people shouting out that he should have called for “Single Payer” than compromised from there miss the fact that, in American politics sucha program would have been a non-starter and written off from the get-go by the mass of American politicians and “opinion-makers”.  But what needed to be done was for the president to start with somet

There was an impression and label for Obama, contradicting the “Audacity of Hope” “Fierce Urgency of Now”, which followed through the campaign.  Obama is “Cool” and “Collect”.  It garnered him a good slice of the electorate for a small “c” conservative outlook looking for a line of “Stability”, and the appeal lied in the man looking past petty politial contrivances.  This came with the claim to “watch the campaign” to see how he would govern.  It came against a Hillary Clinton, liable to take a wild swing in concocting stories about Bosnian Snipers, and against a John McCain, liable to select a very odd running mate or to bolt during an economic emergency.  The problem with this is it makes for a President unwilling to “rock the boat”, and we see it with acceptance of the status quo and unremarkable allowances to the Banking Industry in getting the Economy Running again — no heads are going to crack.  The irony is that the Lou Pritchett style opponents (worrying that at the end of a second Obama term the man will have effectively silenced the usual suspects of talk radio and menacingly enough destroyed his ability to mass viral forward this email message) seized upon a line about “remaking America” — and he was by his campaign type temperamentally not apt to do such a thing even when called for.  We can brush up the charges leveled against President Eisenhower, except with that chorus of boos along the lines of the most fervent haters of President Roosevelt threw out.

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