Friday, January 21, 2011
This whole health-care thing isn't quite working out the way
Republicans planned. My guess is that they'll soon try to change the
subject - but I'm afraid they're already in too deep.
Wednesday's vote to repeal President Obama's health insurance reform
law was supposed to be a crowning triumph. We heard confident GOP
predictions that cowed Democrats would defect in droves, generating
unstoppable momentum that forced the Senate to obey "the will of the
people" and follow suit. The Democrats' biggest domestic
accomplishment would be in ruins and Obama's political standing would
be damaged, perhaps irreparably.
What actually happened, though, is that the Republican majority
managed to win the votes of just three Democrats - all of them Blue
Dogs who have been consistent opponents of the reform package anyway.
In terms of actual defectors, meaning Democrats who changed sides on
the issue, there were none. This is momentum?
The unimpressive vote came at a moment when "the will of the people"
on health care is coming into sharper focus. Most polls that offer a
simple binary choice - do you like the "Obamacare" law or not - show
that the reforms remain narrowly unpopular. Yet a significant fraction
of those who are unhappy complain not that the reform law went too far
but that it didn't go far enough. I think of these people as the
"public option" crowd.
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