There are times when it is safe to say an event is of historical importance as it is happening. The attacks of 09.11 certainly count as one such instance. President Obama’s election two Novembers ago counts as well. I’m not so convinced that Obama signing the new health care bill into law counts. If it had created a public option, or a single-payer system, or even cut out the intermediaries and let fat-cat CEOs vote directly for our politicians, then sure, they could have brought the trumpets out. As it is, though, this bill makes relatively few changes, many of which don’t even take effect for another four years. I’m more confident than most in the Democrats’ ability to hold onto both houses of Congress and the White House in the interim, but even if the bill’s provisions are enacted on schedule and don’t get interrupted by other things, are we even going to remember where we were when Obama signed the bill into effect? I don’t even remember where I was now, and it’s only been a few days. Then again, I was probably asleep.

The most memorable thing about the bill signing may wind up being Joe Biden dropping an f-bomb live on the major news networks. Now, I certainly don’t get rankled over garden-variety cursing, but there comes a point where that sort of stuff just doesn’t work for you any longer. When I took the .org down a more "professional" path after grad school, I made a decision to avoid swearing in here any longer for fear of missing out on potential job opportunities and the like. Still, things like this make you wonder why anyone lets Biden around a live microphone. He’s the inverse of Obama: for every one brilliant thing he says (let’s keep in mind this is the man who pretty much doomed Rudy Giuliani’s presidential aspirations with his "a noun, and a verb, and 09.11" crack), he says a hundred really dumb ones. Obama is unquestionably one of the great orators of our time; they don’t need to put Biden up there to make Obama look good by comparison.

I was hoping that the signing of the bill might make the Republicans stop saying really stupid things, but so far that hasn’t been the case. John McCain pledging "no more cooperation" with the Democrats is like Paris Hilton saying she’s no longer going to make insightful comments about the Middle East peace process; there was nothing there to start with. Because the Republicans and their sycophants-in-arms in the various Tea Party movements have done such a thorough job in attempting to portray Obama as the anti-Christ — a quarter of Republicans already believe that to be the case — we’re seeing that the Republicans are already forced to campaign on completely repealing the bill, even though some parts of it, like stopping health insurers from denying coverage due to pre-existing conditions, enjoy wide and relatively bipartisan support. That’s going to cost Republicans a lot come November unless they can find a way to moderate their message while still keeping the right-wing nutjobs motivated enough to come to the polls. It would be foolish to prognosticate November’s elections in March, but unless the Republicans find a way around this problem, there’s no way I can see them retaking either house of Congress. (They’ll gain seats, but that was due to happen after the last two Democratic landslides anyway.)

The question now is what will happen between now and 2014, when the last parts of the health care bill take effect and we all have to buy insurance or pay penalties to the government. Now that "the bill" is passed, there’s already talk of trying to get a public health insurance plan in under a separate bill, but right now the American public is overdosed on health care. Strategically it’s probably better to leave that until after the midterm elections, and going for Wall Street reform is tactically the best thing the Democrats could do right now, since big banks and brokers are one of the few things most Americans hate more than politicians. I hope that there is a return to health care debate next year, though, and that we can get either a public option or, better still, a single-payer system put into place. The bill that was just passed was a mixed bag at best, and come 2014 I’m not sure I want to know what it will be like trying to purchase a health care plan for myself, unless I somehow get a full-time job with benefits before then.