I'm losing my patience with Pelosi. When will she do anything properly? She fumbles everything and when she doesn't she makes a power grab. Reid isn't much better.
But I can't really agree with the author's view of bumbling healthcare. First off, there was myth promoted by the Democrats themselves that they were a united party with very similar goals in mind. When the fact is, their strategy for the past couple of elections was to put moderates on the ticket and take seats away from the increasingly radical Republican party. It worked extremely well. The problem comes when trying to actually write legislation and realizing Congress isn't heavily liberal at all, it's the typical liberals, the typical conservatives, and the typical moderates. So basically they are back to where they were when they were the dominant Congressional party for so long: tons of seats, no consensus. So the reason the Democrats bumbled healthcare again is because so many of the Democrats are not on board with it. This was never going to be a slam dunk or even an open shot.
If Pelosi and Reid were actually good leaders, this wouldn't be so much of a problem but they always seem to push when they should pull and vice versa. It's so frustrating as a liberal living in America to have these two be ineffective in everything they do.
The other problem here, though, is the system. After studying the American political system for 4 years, the one thing that is most clear is that passing legislation with any kind of teeth is damn near impossible. The founding fathers wanted to make it near impossible to make changes and they succeeded but now that the system has obviously broken it seems impossible to fix. But that's a whole other issue.
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