Sometimes you have to follow a politician’s career a bit to get an idea of where they want to go. The one-minute video below is from a speech on June 30, 2003 from Illinois State Senator Barack Obama to the Illinois AFL-CIO. In it, he clearly affirms that his long-term goal is a single-payer, universal health care system but that “we may not get there immediately. First, we have to take back the White House, and we’ve got to take back the Senate, and we’ve got to take back the House.”
Hmm. He now has all three. So why is it that with a filabuster-proof majority in the Senate, and a strong majority in the House, the President is not as forthright with this sort of language? Sometimes the simplest explanation is the most reasonable: Because the American people don’t really want to go there, but he intends to take us there anyway.