Why healthcare must move this weekend

Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and her congressional lieutenants were burning the midnight oil last evening, preparing for a whirlwind few days in order to get her trillion-dollar health reform bill to the House floor. To the pure political observers, it’s her best strategy. She can’t afford to wait a day longer. As each hour passes, red-state Democrats are waking up and realizing, “What happened on Tuesday night could happen to me next year.” 

Keeping her flock in town over the weekend is not by accident. Pelosi’s henchmen know that if they release the rank and file back to their districts following Tuesday’s shellacking at every level of government, they will certainly get an earful as to why they are stubbornly ignoring the will of the electorate and moving forward.

Exit polls don’t lie. Voters are leery of trillion-dollar government initiatives and still no meaningful return on their taxpayer investment. What perhaps bothers them more is the unapologetic attitude of the White House. This “win at all costs and we’ll sort it out later” attitude is tearing the party from its very roots. At least Bill Clinton went to the microphones the day after Democrats suffered losses and stated, “The era of big government is over.” 

Barack Obama said that as a candidate on the trail. Why so silent now? And here at the first signs of his party’s unraveling, Rahm instead tells all of his guys to avoid the press, especially Fox News? C’mon. Granted, Clinton’s party lost scores of congressional seats, and Tuesday was minor by comparison. But to anyone who says 2009 is not a harbinger of things to come if Democrats don’t shift in new directions must have been watching election returns in Kabul, not Washington.

I’m still amazed at Pelosi’s unfailing belief that healthcare reform is a net win for her party. Just ask Republicans how much credit they received for passing the largest expansion of Medicare with prescription drug coverage. They lost the House of Representatives and the Senate the next two election cycles. But in order to make her dreams come true, she will need to push her lemming-like colleagues hard this week … before they get home and realize she has them running straight off a political cliff.

Williams can be heard nightly on Sirius/XM Power 169 from 9 to 10 p.m.

Visit www.armstrongwilliams.com .