We Need More "Unum" & Less "Pluribus"

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Friday December 18, 2009 · 7:37 AM PST

2009/12/18 · 07:37

Fact is, politics is about uniting your friends and dividing your enemies. Unity builds strength, strength means victory, while division means defeat.

E Pluribus Unum, baby: Out of Many, One. Or as I like to put it "We're all in this thing together."

And/But if we fight -- hammer and tongs -- against each other (for example) about stripping the mandates out of the bill, what does that accomplish? It only unites and strengthens our enemies. After all, they were the ones who made the same argument against Social Security -- "Why should I pay when I won't get the benefit?"

Worse yet, "Why should I pay taxes, when I can spend the money better on what I want and need?"

If we are divided along that fault line, the Republicans will beat us over the head in the 2010 campaign and say, "We told you. We told you so. We told you that IT'S YOUR MONEY, not the government's."

Who wants to see people who belive that become more united? I don't.

Many of you object to giving corporations the peoples' money and I would agree. But it will be easier to stop that end result if we are doing it from a position of strength.

So create HCR 1.0 now. And then campaign on creating an improved HCR 2.0 after November, after the voters re-affirm our majority. In other words, HCR 2.0 is believeable only if HCR 1.0 already exists.

Many of you also object to the individual mandate because you don't want to be forced to buy a crappy product from for-profit companies that have a monopoly.

But stripping out the individual mandates has the opposite effect from what you want -- it makes the pool of insured smaller which drives up the costs even further for the very people who need it most.

I cannot stand the thought of that.

I cannot stand it because we're all in this thing together -- we have to help each other.

Put yourself in the other guy's shoes -- more unum, less pluribus -- and think about what it's like to try to get insurance if you're sick or have a pre-x condition. Maybe then you'll agree that the system has to change. And the system can only BEGIN to change if we agree that mandates are necessary.

Here's the thing: we can't afford to fracture along fault lines defined by our enemies, healthy divided against the sick, young divided against old, pre-x's divided against non-pre-x's, insurable divided against uninsurable, prosperous divided against the needy.

Who benefits when we are divided? Our enemies.

In short I believe the following:

If this bill fails, it will fail because we are divided.

If we are divided against each other, we will be weaker, not stronger.

If we are weaker, we will have even LESS of a majority after the elections -- if we don't lose our majority altogether.

If our majority is smaller -- or if we're in the minority -- we will not get another chance at reform.

So think about it: if you hate this bill now, just wait until you see what an ascendant Republican party does with HCR.

The bottom line for me is this: We need more unity and less division, more unum, less pluribus, not vice versa. We cannot afford to be divided into factions along (bogus) fault lines defined and promoted by our enemies.

We need to divide our enemies and unite our friends. Otherwise we lose big time.

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