Alfred Walking Bull

Last week, on a conference call with the group Conservatives for Patients Rights concerning President Obama's health care reform efforts, South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint said, "If we're able to stop Obama on this it will be his Waterloo. It will break him."  

What the good senator fails to realize is that causing further damage does nothing to repair what is already broken -- our health care system. The Republican Party is failing in every respect to represent Americans on this issue. According to a report by the Commonwealth Fund, a private foundation dedicated to improving health care, America spends the most on health care in the world and ranks 37th in its delivery.  

While DeMint seeks to break the president in his efforts to improve the lives of the average, working American, he also fails to realize that it's us -- Americans who work for a living -- who are already broken. How many of us know someone who has health care issues -- or have horror stories of our own? 

As the Republican Party strives to perpetuate itself as the party that breaks, it's the president who seeks to fix what is broken and empowers us to help in the mending process. 

But we need to foster that empowerment. In addition to DeMint's goal to break the president, members of the Blue Dog coalition in Congress expressed their concern about the price tag associated with the reform movement. It's times like these, as another Democratic president who inherited a financial crisis and mass unemployment could tell us, that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. It's now our turn, we who elected this president, to step up and help him. 

We support him by having those conversations with our friends, neighbors and family as well as other voters we haven't met yet. We ask them if they will support the president's initiatives in reforming health care. We ask them to help us fix what's broken by signing our names to these petitions that go to our elected officials in Congress. If we show them we're dedicated helping them, they're empowered to fight on our behalf, to repair our health care system, and to fix what is broken, as Democrats always do.