TITLE CARD: President Barack Obama’s address to a joint session of congress.

February 24, 2009 

Pres. BARACK OBAMA: Let there be no doubt health care reform cannot wait, it must not wait, and it will not wait another year! [cheers]

SHERYL GAY STOLBERG: The president staked his entire first term on this.

MATT BAI: There’s no bigger priority than health care.

Pres. BARACK OBAMA: Given these facts, we can no longer afford to put health care reform on hold. We can’t afford to do it! [applause]

NARRATOR: For Obama and the country, the stakes were high.

JOHN PODESTA, Obama Adviser: I don’t think anyone in the White House or on Capitol Hill believe that failure’s an option here. They have to be successful in getting health care reform done or they’ll pay a tremendous political price.

NEWSCASTER: This is a huge issue the president is taking on now─

NEWSCASTER: The question is, could health care reform really happen?

NARRATOR: Early on, the president made a strategic decision. To pass health care reform, he’d work with the establishment’s power players.

NEWSCASTER: ─lawmakers, doctors, nurses, hospitals-

NEWSCASTER: ─conferring on how to overhaul health care.

CECI CONNOLLY, Co-author, Landmark: Many of these players for years, if not decades, had a record of opposing any sort of health care reform efforts.

Pres. BARACK OBAMA: And what a remarkable achievement that would be, something that Democrats and Republicans, business and labor, consumer groups and providers, all of us could share extraordinary pride in finally dealing with something that has been vexing us for so long. The cost of health care─

NARRATOR: In these first days, a fragile coalition seemed possible.

Pres. BARACK OBAMA: So let’s get to work. Thank you.

NARRATOR: But to keep it together, Obama had to move quickly.

NOAM SCHEIBER, Author, The Escape Artists: And that calculation is, “We’ll move for a quick kill”─ that’s how they referred to it, “a quick kill,” on Capitol Hill.

Rep. NANCY PELOSI: It was thought that we─ the Senate was going to have a bill by June, we would have a bill by July. And we would go to conference and this would be over.

NARRATOR: But the president didn’t just want a bill. He wanted Democrats and Republicans to get behind it.

DAN BALZ, The Washington Post: A bipartisan outcome, even in a minimalist sense, was certainly a very, very high priority of President Obama.