AVERY SPARR’S small, flaxen-haired head hung over the placard that covered her as she sat in her stroller. The child clutched the sides of the panel and balanced the bottom on her feet, physically dwarfed by the enormity of her debt.
“I’m only three, but I owe Uncle Sam $40,776,” Avery’s sign said. Her father, Patrick (34) stood beside the child, holding his own placard. The unemployed construction worker had done his maths. If America pays back $1 million each day, President Obama’s $787 billion stimulus plan will be paid for in 2,156 years, while the $12 trillion national debt will take 32,886 years. “Wake up America,” Patrick Sparr concluded.
Mr Sparr was one of scores of people mobilised by the Tea Party movement to protest at the gates of Arcadia University, where Mr Obama yesterday began his 11th hour crusade to persuade the American public, and through them the House of Representatives, to ratify the Senate’s healthcare reform Bill before he leaves for Asia on March 18th.
As his motorcade pulled into the university, Mr Obama must have seen the forest of slogans: the coiled rattlesnake with the “Don’t Tread on Me” motto from the 1776 revolution; “Stop spending”; “No to Socialism”; “Bankrupt USA? Yes we can”.
“My kids don’t have insurance,” Mr Sparr confessed. “I’m for something. Just not this.” Social security and Medicare were “bankrupting the country”. Even the post office was going broke. “The government doesn’t have a record of doing these things well,” Mr Sparr noted.
And the Tea Party? “I love it!” he exclaimed. “Finally the American people have a voice they didn’t have before. Healthcare would have passed months ago if it wasn’t for us.” A man in a blue suit with thick eyeglasses harangued the protesters from behind a rough plywood lectern. “You do not want the government to control your life!” he shouted. “Absolutely not!” said Patrick Sparr.
“We’re not Europe. We’re not Cuba. We’re the USA,” the man behind the lectern continued. “USA! USA! USA!” the Tea Party followers chanted. “We do not want to emulate Europe!” he hammered on, and the Tea Partiers cheered more.
The man with the grudge against Europe turned out to be Steven Lonegan, whose Irish father emigrated from Westmeath, and whose mother came from Italy.
He is the state director of Americans for Prosperity, “a free-market, grassroots, taxpayer activist organisation”.
When he began to lose his eyesight, Mr Lonegan recounts, he was offered social security and welfare payments, food stamps and vocational training. “That was the worst day of my life,” he said. “I could feel the cold fingers of government wrapping around my soul.”
Inside the flag-decked gymnasium, I talked to Joe Hoeffel, a Montgomery County official and Democratic gubernatorial candidate. Where the Tea Partiers saw spiralling deficits, Mr Hoeffel saw “a way to get costs under control”.
Far from scoffing at Europe, Mr Hoeffel was ashamed of the US system. “The insurance companies charge whatever they want. People get sick and get dropped. I don’t think any other country in the world would put up with it.”
Passing the healthcare Bill now “could make the difference between us winning or losing the (November) mid-terms,” Mr Hoeffel said. “If it passes, the Republicans’ obstructionism will come back to haunt them.”
A student offered prayers for earthquake-stricken Haiti and Chile, and for gridlock-stricken Capitol Hill: “We pray, Father, that you will give our leaders guidance to work collaboratively. We pray for our leaders to work across party lines.” Belatedly, Mr Obama has demanded an “up or down” Yes or No vote of Congress. After courting Republicans for a year, he’s given up on the bipartisan dream. And he’s laced every recent speech with true life horror stories of insurance company victims.
Leslie Banks, a single mother with diabetes, whose insurance company just doubled her monthly premiums from $301 to $659, was chosen to introduce the president yesterday. There were wild cheers when Ms Banks said: “Healthcare must be subject to rules, to checks and balances.”
Once more, the insurance companies took a beating. “In my home state of Illinois, rates are going up 60 per cent,” Mr Obama said. “You just heard from a woman whose rates went up 100 per cent. 100 per cent.” He promised to end “what millions of Americans are going through, because we allow the insurance industry to run wild in this country”.
Rebecca Mueller (28) is studying to become a genetic counsellor. President Obama’s speech was “awesome”, she told me. She suffers from cystic fibrosis, a chronic genetic condition that forces her to have two-hour daily treatments to clear her lungs.
“My life whole life has been subject to insurance company clauses,” Ms Mueller said.
“My father designed his career in business around getting insurance for me. I grew up worrying about the biology of the disease. Now I worry about the finances of it. I think enough people feel desperate now that we might actually get this thing done.”