According to Kennedy School Lecturer Elaine C. Kamarck, making health care the top priority on the agenda was risky from the start.

“I think that [the Obama administration] didn’t understand that bringing together the left and the right meant agreeing on an agenda,” Kamarck says. “The agenda they ran with was in fact not at all an agenda that the Republicans were interested in, and that was health care.”

Mansfield put it more bluntly, saying, “Democrats jumped off a cliff” with health care reform because it was unpopular with the American people at the time.

The health care act also faced resistance because of the general population’s lack of understanding about the bill, says Nathaniel G. Butler ’68, who has worked in health care—including the state Medicaid program—for 30 years.

Most of the population has been deceived by Republican distortions of the reform bill, Butler says.

“Government takeover of health care? This is not a government takeover of health care. But people have been led to believe that,” Butler says.

A NATION DIVIDED

Obama campaigned on the promise of bipartisanship, and he was elected with a vision of a unified America.

Yet in Obama’s first two years, Congress has become even more mired in party politics.

Karmarck says that the president’s partisan choice of placing health care reform on top of the agenda has only led to political division and contributed to the birth of the recent Tea Party movement, one of the most potent forces in this year’s election.

“Those [Tea Partiers] were people worried with spending,” Karmarck says.

The movement—which targets large federal spending bills like the stimulus and health care—has attracted hundreds of thousands, by some estimates, and might be potentially fueled by wider disdain.

“At heart, the Tea Party movement is an expression of the desire of a certain slice of American society that wants to take back for themselves the America that they believed once existed—to take it back from the coalition of ‘liberal elites’ and people of different ethnic and racial groups,” Kennedy School Professor Alexander Keyssar ’69 says.

In his victory speech after the November 2008 election, Obama tempered the Democratic Party’s “great victory,” by promising to accept the congressional and presidential gains “with a measure of humility and determination to heal the divides that have held back our progress.”

But health care reform—a feat that many professors acknowledged was a wide-ranging revolution that had proven unachievable in previous presidencies—passed Congress without a single Republican vote.