Dem win is built on sand By RICH LOWRY
The passage of ObamaCare last night was the high-water mark of the Democratic ascendancy.
Democrats forced through their signature initiative in an act of ideological heedlessness that will cost them seats and perhaps their majorities in the fall, and will remain a source of poisonous contention in American politics for years to come.
The vote represented a significant personal victory for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who scoffed at scaling back Democratic ambitions in the wake of the loss of Ted Kennedy's seat in Massachusetts.
She prevailed in internal Democratic deliberations and then personally lobbied a list of 68 waverers, resorting as necessary to "scary tough" tactics, in the words of an anonymous Democrat quoted by The New York Times.
Pelosi yesterday wielded the same sledgehammer-like gavel used during the 1965 enactment of Medicare, an apt symbol of the Democrats' historic commitment to the expansion of the social welfare state.
If the enactment of a program for universal coverage fulfills a long-standing goal of the Democrats, this wasn't how it was supposed to happen -- with public opinion firmly opposed, with protesters chanting just steps away from the Capitol, with procedural contortions and brazen deals, with blatantly dishonest accounting, with a wave of popular revulsion threatening to undo their work.
Democrats sealed their majority yesterday with a characteristically farcical deal over abortion.
The Senate bill provides federal funding for the procedure, in a departure from the long-standing prohibition of such funding under the Hyde Amendment. Pro-life Democrats led by Michigan's Rep. Bart Stupak didn't want to support the Senate bill without the Hyde-like restrictions that were in the version first passed the House.
But they folded for a legally meaningless executive order purporting to preserve the status quo as defined by Hyde.
The bill makes the entire category of "pro-life Democrat" look dubious.
The question now is whether Democrats have built their reform on a rock or on sand.
If they had stacked the bill so the major benefits came first, underpromised so it would exceed expectations once enacted and designed it to be fiscally sustainable, it'd rest on a solid foundation.
Instead, desperate to sell the unpopular reform in a center-right country, they've done the opposite on all counts:
* They backloaded the benefits to keep the official costs in the first 10 years just under $1 trillion. This makes the bill vulnerable to rollback or diminishment over time, especially as representations made about it prove untrue.
* The bill won't reduce premiums and costs as Obama promises.
* As its tawdry fiscal tricks -- double-counting revenue, keeping inconvenient new spending off the books, assuming unlikely Medicare savings -- get exposed in the harsh light of reality, Obama's description of the bill as an indispensable deficit-reduction measure will look equally cynical and laughable.
For all that, the left's investment in Obama beginning in the 2008 nomination contest has been vindicated. He promised to reject Clintonian triangulation, and he has. He talked of transforming the country, and has taken a major step toward social democracy in America.
Despite his silky rhetoric, when push came to shove, he adopted the partisan hardball beloved by lefty bloggers to forestall serious compromise and work his ideological will.
Obama stands exposed as the kind of unabashed liberal Democrat who hasn't won a presidential election since 1964. The first electoral test for this iteration of Obama, shorn of all pretense to moderation, comes in November.
The mid-term elections will in large part be a referendum on health care, as the exclamation point on top of a vaulting agenda of government aggrandizement.
Democrats won the battle within their caucus to pass a large-scale bill that threatens to change the relationship between citizen and government. But they haven't yet won the battle for the country.
That begins today.
http://www.nypost.com/f/print/news/national/dem_win_is_built_on_sand_JFyurn6MCBPHcFazCsewhO
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