President Barack Obama has leapt out of his political sick-bed, ripped out his feeding tubes and is ready to dance a jig around the Oval office. The Congressional approval of healthcare reform has reinvigorated the Obama presidency in a way that has implications not just for Americans, but for the world.
By pushing through a social reform that eluded generations of presidents from Teddy Roosevelt to Bill Clinton, Mr Obama can now point to a genuinely historic achievement. He has turned around his image as a weak president who cannot get things done – just when it was getting dangerously close to becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Over the past year, the optimistic glow that surrounded Mr Obama when he took the oath of office has faded away. In its place came new and less flattering images: Obama the talker, not the doer; Obama the naive president, who was getting pushed around by the world's tough guys; Obama, the hate figure for the American right, who lost one of the safest Democratic seats in the Senate in Massachusetts.