Think you hate health care reform now, fellow Democrats?

Just wait until you drive it.

So, you’re a Democrat.  And you thrilled at the 2006 and 2008 elections, when all of America seemed to wake up and smell the Bushes, discover their ineptitude, and vote the Republicans out of office.

In ushered an era of new accountability and transparency.   Of curbed executive privilege and bipartisan reform.  The first female Speaker of the House, and the soft-spoken veteran insider-cum-Majority Leader, alongside the Great(er) Communicator, seemed to promise that happy days, oh happy days, were here again.

Ten months later, the Democratic Party is about as popular as Ken Jeong popping out from under the ring to co-guest host  WWE’s Monday Night Raw with Jeremy Piven (making a fine recovery from his near-death, off-Broadway, sushi poisoning)

The shelf-life of Ken Jeong’s appeal may mirror that of the Democratic Party, but really, disheartened Democrats should take a page from Jeong’s co-star, Chevy Chase, the seemingly left-for-dead funnyman who has turned a stint last spring on Chuck into a career resurgence in the masterful Community.

Not the contemporary, shadow-of-his-former-self-with-still-impeccable-comedic-timing Chevy Chase. Instead, the spry, young, self-effacing Chevy Chase of yore.  (Hopefully, we can cut out the intervening, excruciating 26 years: Cops and Robbersons, Memoirs of an Invisible Man, The Chevy Chase Show, etc.).

In National Lampoon’s Family Vacation, Chase plays the earnest, hard-working, well-intentioned Clark Griswold, whose plan to take his family on an all-American road trip goes horribly wrong.

It begins inauspiciously with Griswold and his son arriving to the car dealership to pick up their Antartic blue super sports wagon with the CB and the optional rally fun pack, only to get stuck with a total lemon:

Democrats should find this scenario eerily familiar.  We sat down at the dealership (polling booth), talked it over with the dealer (Obama) and ordered the shiny (single-payer), powerful (universal coverage), tricked-out (extended Medicare coverage) health care that would lower our deficits, eliminate the bloodsucking middlemen, and make all of us healthier.

Ed went to headquarters (Congress) and called us with the good news: we’d have a car by Labor Day!

Of course, Salesman Ed was shocked–shocked!–that headquarters couldn’t deliver by the deadline.  He’d get us the car, all right, but the deadline is going to be tricky.  Six weeks at least, but then you’ve got to consider that, really, the better car is the truckster (elections are coming up, there are other issues on the table), it’s going to be hard to swing the wagon this time of year.

Now, of course, the deadline is Christmas–oh wait, that won’t work either.  The deadline is the State of the Union address.  And the truckster is a souped-up jalopi that, if you balance everyone just right, will haul lots of people across the country just fine:

After all, what you really wanted were wheels, right?  And, really, wasn’t your goal was to cross the country?

Howard Dean is right to say that what is before Congress right now isn’t the ideal of substantial health care reform:

“This is essentially the collapse of health care reform in the United States Senate. And, honestly, the best thing to do right now is kill the Senate bill and go back to the House … You have the vast majority of Americans want the choices, they want real choices. They don’t have them in this bill. This is not health care reform and it’s not close to health care reform.”

But that’s the issue, isn’t it?  If we want anything–literally, anything–that even resembles health care reform, then we have to go with the party that’s sort of a little bit maybe interested in health care reform.  And that’s the Democrats.

And if we want to kill health care reform, or plan to make a ton of money such that we won’t need to worry about the cost of health care reform, then we get behind the Republicans.

And in the middle, of course, is the electorate, terrified out of its mind at the prospect of living without insurance, reasonably encouraged by the good stuff in the current legislation (props to Ezra Klein at the Washington Post, who outlines the how and why of these in much better detail):

–Extended coverage to 97% of Americans
–Mandatory private national nonprofit health care coverage made cost-effective for the poorest Americans
–No denial of coverage based on nefarious pre-existing conditions
–No arbitrary monetary caps on annual and lifetime coverage
–No sudden dropped or watered-down coverage
–Caps on out-of-pocket expenses
–Required coverage for preventive care
–Short and long term deficit reductions
–Mandatory tax credits for small businesses providing group coverage to employees

Americans have every right to believe that the Democrats screwed the pooch on this one, missing out on much more substantial reform that would significantly improve the situation of health care and health care coverage in the United States.

And that may come–as President Clinton argues, Democrats are toast if they don’t pass something before next year’s mid-term elections.

Democrats are probably toast either way.  Republican opposition has been lockstep perfect in its total refusal to participate in any reform effort, and as a result, they seem principled and stubborn, while the Democrats seem over-reaching and flailing.

Unfortunately for Obama, his best argument is that what America might have become without his economic and health care stewardship would have been far, far worse than what it’s getting now.

Fellow Democrats, this is health care reform in 2009 in the United States.  It’s ugly, cheap, miserable, and nothing like what we thought we would get.  And it just barely beats our current system.

In other words, its a political achievement.

Like Santa Claus, The Easter Bunny, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the legend often turns out to be much sexier than the real thing.

Democrats, it’s time to drive the family truckster off the lot.