By promising everything to everybody the President is rapidly finding himself in the favor of nobody .
The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) backed out of an event with other organizations promoting the Senate healthcare reform bill Wednesday over concerns about changes made to the legislation to accommodate centrist Democrats.
Big Pharma, the hospital lobby and insurance companies are turning the Senate version of the bill into a veritable food fight that is becoming a Ground Hog day farce for Majority Leader Reid.
The spectacle of the ObamaCare fratricide that is laying waste to the Democratic Party (in Technicolor) is a sight for the ages, one of the great set pieces in politics that will be watched by political junkies for ages. I am reminded of that dramatic scene in February of this year, a mere ten months ago, when President Obama reigned with a moral superiority and arrogance of power that was breath taking for those have been around politics for a few decades. With the sweep of his pen the president planted the seed of his own political demise:
“We have begun the essential work of keeping the American dream alive,” he declared before putting his pen to the 1,434-page American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. “I don’t want to pretend that this marks the end of our economic problems. … Today does mark the beginning of the end.“
Come November 2010 I suspect there might be around seventy Democratic congressmen and more than a few Democratic Senators that would agree that February 2009 was indeed the beginning of the end….for them. In what is turning out to be a legislative and policy superfecta carrying enormous odds for failure, the Democrats of 2008 bet their future on a toxic wager of Stimulus excess, Cap and Trade, ObamaCare and pandering to terrorists. Who in their right mind but a drunken politician staggering out of an inaugural ball would have bet their political fortunes on what we know today as the official policy of the Obama administration?
Historically, besotted pols sober up soon after the election festivities but this party, after eleven months, is just showing signs of winding down and a lot of veteran Democratic legislators are hitting the exits before they get the axe from voters.
There is no sign, however, that the White House is getting the message just as the Republicans are learning how to throw a fast ball high and inside. This is the very moment the opposition Party should go on the offensive. Having urged a brow beaten minority to remain unanimous in its opposition to what at the time seemed like an unstoppable Democratic juggernaut all I can say now is “what a difference ten months makes”.
