This is how the 2007 amnesty bill died, you may recall. It wasn’t Republicans who killed it, it was Republicans plus big-labor Democrats plus a few pro-amnesty liberal Dems who thought the bill didn’t go far enough. Ultimately, the 60-vote needle was simply too narrow to be threaded. And now here we are again. From Kos’s Twitter feed:
Insurance companies win. Time to kill this monstrosity coming out of the Senate. Remember, the overwhelming nutroots CW to this point has been that something must be passed. What, precisely, gets passed is important but ultimately secondary to the task of passing something and thereby avoiding a reprise of the left’s 1994 post-HillaryCare nightmare. I never bought that CW for reasons articulated here by Karl, but it was a fact of life. Maybe no longer, though.
If Kos’s thinking is representative of other progressives, then the lefty base may be so dispirited by the public-option meltdown that the anticipated turnout boost next year from passing a bill never materializes. Which, if so, would be catastrophic for Dems: It was Kos’s own poll, after all, that showed a giant 25-point enthusiasm gap between Republican and Democratic voters last month. If Obama signs a bad bill into law, conservatives will be even more energized and liberals will be enervated. The reckoning is coming, albeit a year too late to derail this clusterfark.
To celebrate our new bipartisan consensus that the bill sucks, and in honor of the left’s festive holiday attack on Joe Lieberman’s wife, I leave you with this special yuletide treat. Update: Good point from the comments. As the left gets ready to turn on Obama and Reid for their “betrayal,” can the media at least try to be evenhanded with the civil war/party purity meme?
