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David Rogers: Democrats want to seize historic moment

[David Rogers is Senior Congressional Reporter for Politico]

Health care is big for House Democrats: big like Social Security in the ’30s and civil rights in the ’60s, big like the war stories retold now in party caucuses as lawmakers grapple with the floor vote that is just days away.

All politicians live in the present — or risk perishing, as seen Tuesday night. But history also sits on the shoulders of Democrats these days, and having failed to act on health care in 1994 — and then having lost power — they feel an almost inexorable push to seize this moment before it slips away.

Turning back “would be an absolute disaster,” House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.) told POLITICO Wednesday. “I can tell you right now, if we don’t pass this bill, I don’t care who you are; if you have a D behind your name and this bill has not been passed, you are in tremendous peril next year.”

“It is so big I can’t really appreciate it because it’s been unfinished business for me since 1960,” said House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Howard Berman (D-Calif.). “You get so caught up in these different issues in the end, but this has been our standard: to do things like get universal coverage. Whatever’s wrong we’ll try to fix, but this is just one big, big leap.”

The war stories — some emotional, some quirky — now serve to fire up the base but also appeal to wavering members to be part of history.

Rep. John Dingell, the Michigan Democrat and House dean, speaks of his father, who served in Congress before him during the New Deal. Clyburn, the first African-American whip from the Deep South, recalls the choices faced by the civil rights community as it grappled with compromises offered by President Lyndon B. Johnson.

Rep. Robert Andrews (D-N.J.) admits his lasting regret for having backed away from supporting President Bill Clinton’s economic program in the 1990s. House Appropriations Committee Chairman Dave Obey (D-Wis.) resurrects the saga of a long-forgotten, four-term Wisconsin progressive who backed Social Security in 1935, only to be undercut by angry seniors stirred up by the promise of getting the same benefits free.

Gerald Boileau?

His picture hangs in the Democrats’ Appropriations Committee office, just off the House floor. And years after he lost in the 1938 elections and had become a county judge, the onetime Republican stopped in at a Wausau, Wis., supper club operated by Obey’s father and left a lasting imprint on the future congressman, then a member of the Wisconsin Legislature.

“We started to have a couple of martinis together, and I said to him, ‘Gerry, what beat you in ’38?’” Obey told POLITICO.

Social Security proved a major factor, and Boileau ran afoul of an activist California physician, Francis Townsend, who wanted to give all seniors $200 a month outright. President Franklin D. Roosevelt insisted that the elderly contribute to Social Security to make it more sustainable. And the fight — which spawned Townsend Clubs to organize seniors — dovetailed with a larger struggle between New Dealers and critics like Huey Long or that forerunner of modern bloggers and talk shows, “radio priest” Rev. Charles Coughlin...

Read entire article at Politico