Figuring out the real reason behind a political decision is a very tricky thing. Politicians support legislation for myriad factors, including votes, ideology, and life story. President Obama’s insistence on making healthcare a priority can certainly be fit into all three categories. Many analysts believe that if the Democrats successfully pull off healthcare, they will be the dominant party for a long time. Government run healthcare is also congruent with his liberal ideology. But his gamble might emanate from his mother’s fight with ovarian cancer.
Obama usually speaks with dispassionate coolness. Yes, his voice is engaging, but it’s much more professorial than emotional. Yet, when he brings up the constant fights his mother had with insurance companies about being covered for her cancer, he speaks with a rare moral outrage. Not the kind of faux outrage that he expressed over the AIG bonus money, but a genuine outrage bothered by the crude capitalism that is associated with healthcare. In the fall of 2007, he said that “My mother died of cancer at 53…In those last painful months she was more worried about paying her medical bills than getting well.” The most cynical might claim that he was simply using an emotional story for political gain, but it seems probable that he has steadfastly carried this moral belief with him since he became personally entangled with the travails of healthcare. During the primaries, it came out that he explicitly supported universal healthcare during his state senate days. He probably moderated his position to navigate the national winds and not the other way around.
Biographers of President Johnson say that his commitment to the Great Society directly came from tangible experiences with poverty. President Clinton supposedly spent enough time on racial issues to be dubbed the first black president because of his first hand account of segregation in the South. And it just might be that Obama fights more vigorously for healthcare than energy, education, and the rest of the liberal agenda because of his mother’s story. It might sound fallacious to political scholars-and it might be-but emotions should never be underestimated in trying to understand someone’s true intent. Relentless ambition comes not from intellectual derivation, but from a heart that seeks purpose.
