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Paul Starr on healthcare reform:

If Congress can complete work on health-care legislation and send it to the president (as of mid-January, the final bill is still under negotiation), it will be a stunning historical achievement and the most important liberal reform since the 1960s. It may also be the most underappreciated social legislation in recent history. Never in my experience has such a big reform been treated as so small. Never have Democratic members of Congress who are putting their careers on the line for something they believe in been so vilified as sellouts by influential progressives. And never have those progressives been so grudging in their endorsement of landmark legislation or so willing to see it defeated.

Exactly right. Elsewhere, James Morone looks to the legacy of Harry Truman to show Obama and the Democratic Party the way forward:

Truman submitted his healthcare plan in 1946 to mighty cries of “socialism!” So many groups lined up to blast the proposal that Congress extended its hearings and then buried the plan. The Democrats lost their congressional majorities, and Truman went into the 1948 reelection campaign polling below 30%.

If ever there was a time to retreat on healthcare, this was it. Instead, Truman (who had been, as he put it, “a dub of a speaker”) found his voice. He passionately embraced the policies he cared about, especially national health insurance. Fifteen times a day on his long, famous whistle-stop tour he would rise and scorch the medical lobbies and their congressional pals. Truman, of course, won that election. He never came close on healthcare reform, but he kept on fighting. As a result, he left his party a legacy, an ideal to fight for.

Truman didn’t get the healthcare plan he wanted, but he won reelection that year and Democrats took back the House. And thanks to his full-throated defense of universal healthcare, the ground was paved for LBJ to pass Medicare 15 years later.

Obama needs to provide the same defense tonight. And when he’s done, Democrats need to knock some heads, agree on a reconciliation compromise, and pass the Senate bill. If they don’t, disaster awaits in November.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT.

We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

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