Medicare was a liberal dream

Medicare's 50th birthday is a chance to see some old photos of President Lyndon Johnson and remember that it wasn't so long ago this country set a goal to end poverty, expand health care, broaden civil rights, respect working people and support education.

Those were goals worthy of a great nation. They ran into the buzz saw of conservatism.

Republicans have done their best to shoot holes in social values. They're in court in Arizona right now fighting to roll back health care coverage for more than 350,000 low-income residents.

Contrast that with the challenges in Johnson's War on Poverty speech, delivered to Congress Jan. 8, 1964:

"Unfortunately, many Americans live on the outskirts of hope -- some because of their poverty, and some because of their color, and all too many because of both. Our task is to help replace their despair with opportunity.

This administration today, here and now, declares unconditional war on poverty in America. I urge this Congress and all Americans to join with me in that effort.

It will not be a short or easy struggle . . . . The richest Nation on earth can afford to win it. We cannot afford to lose it. . . .

Poverty is a national problem, requiring improved national organization and support. But this attack, to be effective, must also be organized at the state and the local level . . . .

Our chief weapons in a more pinpointed attack will be better schools, and better health, and better homes, and better training, and better job opportunities to help more Americans, especially young Americans, escape from squalor and misery and unemployment rolls where other citizens help to carry them.

Very often a lack of jobs and money is not the cause of poverty, but the symptom. The cause may lie deeper in our failure to give our fellow citizens a fair chance to develop their own capacities, in a lack of education and training, in a lack of medical care and housing, in a lack of decent communities in which to live and bring up their children."

Conservatives love to mock those ideas. Democrats too often duck their heads and act ashamed of liberal ideals. Instead, they should raise their expectations. They should remember soaring rhetoric from another powerful Democratic leader.

Ted Kennedy said, ". . . the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die."