When it was finally over, and the President and Speaker showed the country how it feels when it is able to at least begin to tackle a real problem, my 23 year old daughter said that this was the first time in her life that something like this happened when she could follow the debate and understand the issues. As she said this, though, it suddenly occurred to her 58 year old father that it was the first time such a thing had happened in his lifetime, too.

How could this be? I was 15 years old when medicare was enacted, and slightly younger when the civil and voting rights acts were passed. Even at that age, the broad outlines of the civil rights questions were apparent, but, not having ever been to the South, I had no personal experience with people being denied service in restaurants because they were black, or the idea that a playground had to have two drinking fountains, so that there would be one for "whites only." The need to help the poor and elderly pay medical bills was not something that had yet entered my list of worries.

I remember the scenes where President Johnson would sign a bill with many pens, handing them to various politicians standing behind him. That ended for the most part with the medicare legislation. As we learned about those things which were not widely reported at the time, and as we watched our country change, we all heard about President Johnson's comments to Bill Moyers about losing the South for a generation as he signed the Civil Rights Act in 1964. With electoral maps that closely resemble the division of the country during the civil war there are significant and hard to ignore the accuracy of President Johnson's forecast, although if "a generation" is defined as twenty years, he was wrong as to length of this historic shift.

It was that fact that many knew to be so that made the history lesson that Speaker Gingrich tried to deliver this week so striking to so many of us.

Here is the exactly how Dan Balz reported it in his Washington Post article last Sunday:

former Republican House speaker Newt Gingrich said Obama and the Democrats will regret their decision to push for comprehensive reform. Calling the bill "the most radical social experiment . . . in modern times," Gingrich said: "They will have destroyed their party much as Lyndon Johnson shattered the Democratic Party for 40 years" with the enactment of civil rights legislation in the 1960s.

There followed, at Speaker Gingrich's insistence, a series of semi-corrections and explanations in Balz' paper and, astoundingly, in the New York Times (because Paul Krugman made reference to the comment)) based on the former Speaker's insistence that

he was referring not to the civil rights legislation but to Johnson overreaching on his management of the economy, the Vietnam War and the cultural divisions that emerged partly because of that war. Gingrich said Johnson erred on civil rights by supporting busing to integrate schools and by failing to take a firmer stance against racial violence in urban areas.

And while the desire to stay out of Speaker Bluster's way was excessive and unseemly (doesn't the comment from the former Speaker's "communications director" on George Packer's blog on the New Yorker seem vaguely threatening?) his second version of his rant---though it does not support the point he was trying to make---has a ring which those of us who were there then can recognize.

It was "the war"---the Vietnam War---which, almost as much as the civil rights legislation, destroyed the relationship of the government and the Democratic Party to the New Deal ethic which ended with the passage of medicare. President Roosevelt introduced this concept and summarized it as the idea that

government in a modern civilization has certain inescapable obligations to its citizens, among which are protection of the family and the home, the establishment of a democracy of opportunity, and aid to those overtaken by disaster.

The war ended all that. The natural allies of such a government left that movement in droves finding the war to be evidence that "the government" could not be trusted, and the aftermath of Senator Kennedy's assassination in 1968, the odd process by which Vice President Humphrey then became the party's nominee despite having not run in any presidential primaries and the response to the protests of that and the war itself at the Democratic National Convention, as proof that the party could not be trusted either.

For the rest of that year and, to one degree or another, until the theft of the 2000 election, that lack of enthusiasm for the Democratic Party persisted along with a view that there was no difference between the parties. It never felt that way to some of us, but we were met with the same pitying look that all delusional geeks get.

The election of President Obama, and the enthusiasm for his campaign by people who did not suffer through the war, including a few who are two generations removed from the war, gave hope to those who have wanted the aftermath of that terrible time to end. The vote last Sunday, and the reaction to it, means even more.

When we were in college we sometimes bought into the Greening of America concept where we would be represented in Congress by people who shared our views: maybe even a musician. Then the New Deal could be updated and restored to meet the needs of the world of the 1970s and go forward into the future.

Last night, I saw the great Dar Williams play a benefit to raise money for the re-election of my Congressman, John Hall, the co-founder and lead guitarist and singer of Orleans. He played, too, and was outstanding as well. The event was held in a barn outside the home of my closest friend in college. We looked at one another, through many years in which we have not seen one another, seemed both almost awe struck and at least quite amazed that, in some way, what seemed to be unlikely had begun to come true.

Except for a time in which I lived in New York City, John Hall's election to the House of Representatives, a product of the revolution against President Bush in 2006, marked the first time someone who truly represented me, was representing me in the House. That the first time I heard of him was while listening to a song called "Let There Be Music" is, at the very least, interesting. A Congressman who raises money from the people who listen to that type of music, with the help of other musicians, rather than grovelling to those who want Congress to help them make money at our expense, seems to be someone who ought to remain in Washington.

So Passover---the celebration of a deliverance from slavery----comes at just the right time. Hope and change are in the air.