http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/07/bob-dole-health-care-will_n_312837.html
Bob Dole: Health Care Will Pass, GOP Should Get On Board
Former Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kans.) told a group of local Kansas reporters on Wednesday, that opposition to the president's health care package had been driven by knee-jerk partisanship and urged Congressional Republicans to get on board a version of reform.
The 1996 Republican presidential candidate also predicted, following a speech at a health care reform summit in Kansas, that "there will be a signing ceremony" for a reform bill sometime this year or early in 2010.
But the comments that seem likely to create the most ripples were those that dealt with congressional opposition to the White House. Dole, according to reports, framed the pushback to Barack Obama's reform agenda as almost perfunctory in nature.
"Sometimes people fight you just to fight you," he said, according to The Kansas City Star. "They don't want Reagan to get it, they don't want Obama to get it, so we've got to kill it...
"Health care is one of those things," he added. "Now we've got to do something."
Dole said he did not know what a final health care bill would look like, even though he was confident it would make it to the president's desk. His lament of the partisanship surrounding the health care debate, he hinted, came from going through a similarly taxing experience during the early years of the Clinton administration.
Discussing the failure to get a health care reform passed in 1993 and 1994, he said politics -- both from Congress and the White House -- was to blame. "Politics took over," he said. "And you lost."
Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/07/bob-dole-health-care-will_n_312837.html
I was even somewhat shocked when I heard Bob Dole come out in favor of the Health Care Bill. But by golly gee folks, that man has learned something from his stay in the political arena and for that we can all be grateful. Thank-you for this article and I agree with Bob Dole's ending statements from this article. He so damned right. Politics does take over and run away with things all the time. Someone has go to stop them from running the wrong way though.---ginger
