In retrospect, you can see what Team Obama was hoping for – having gone to school on the failure of the Clinton healthcare effort, their first goal was to get full Congressional buy-in, mostly by staffing out the bill to them. Once the House and Senate had passed something, Obama would play his hand based on what looked most viable in the conference report.
They can’t have expected anything but what they got from the GOP. Once Jim DeMint tipped his hand with the remarks about how they intended for health care to be “Obama’s Waterloo,” anybody with a brain in their skull should have expected scorched earth. I don’t think they expected to get to the August recess without a bill, which made matters much worse. They certainly didn’t plan on Ted Kennedy dying, or the circus that followed for months. Democrats lack anything remotely like the party discipline of the GOP, and all the proof needed is in the Senate. For all the talk about the two women in Maine, they were right there with their party when the final votes were taken. Meanwhile, the Democrats’ own “mavericks” had to be bought off – although, fortunately, the nature of those favors make them easy to erase in a budget reconciliation process.
There are plenty of DFHs* who would have liked to see more – a public option and Medicare buy-in at the least, a full-fledged single-payer system at best – but all the clamor for using reconciliation to blast through a 51-49 bill in the Senate overlooks the fact that the House wasn’t going to deliver anything like it. In fact, the only way the bill got through the first time was with a pile of extra abortion-related folderol that brought on a bunch of Democratic pro-lifers, which suggests that an actual government-funded plan would have been no easier to push through.
The GOP was probably out of their minds to think that they could ride this to an overthrow – anything is possible in the House, certainly, but to pick up 40 seats when they have more retiring members than the Democrats is probably optimistic. Certainly turning over 9 more seats in the Senate is asking too much, in all likelihood – and the Democrats, if they can’t have a filibuster-proof majority, would probably be as happy with 53 reliable votes as 59 where they have to look over their shoulder to see what a Nelson or a Lieberman or a Lincoln is playing at. The GOP also neglected to consider something David Frum points out – that in 1994, the Democratic president had been elected with 43% of the vote AND there was ample fertile ground for the GOP to take since the South had not completed its partisan realignment. Long story short: the GOP may well try to run against this bill in November, but as people get more of a sense of what actually happened, they may not response to promises to restore things like the Medicare Part D “donut hole” and coverage denial for children with pre-existing conditions.
In the meantime, Nancy Pelosi has to go to the front of the line for top-seed Speakers of the House – she delivered what the likes of Sam Rayburn, Carl Albert, and Tip O’Neill never could. Gingrich still stands in front for philosophical implications, but Nancy wins on results delivered.
* Dirty Fucking Hippies – not the ones selling weed out on Telegraph Ave, though they are most assuredly dirty. These are the opposite number of the Teabaggers – the ones who are still fighting Nixon and COINTELPRO, the ones who talk about “self-appointed experts from the military-industrial corporate-lock-down security complex” when you’re just trying to run an OS update on their workstations. The ones who thought that Obama was going to bring about the Age of Aquarius – in stark contrast to anything about the man that was borne out by, you know, evidence. The difference between them and the Teabaggers is that the Teabagger types always come home to the GOP in the end. The DFHs just go off to Boulder and Austin and Santa Cruz and sulk.