Obama and health care, part 2

This Slate column does a pretty good job of encapsulating what health care passage means for President Barack Obama, which I wrote about yesterday. The writer's greatest perspective is how Obama used his sway to pull the Democrats along like lemmings over a cliff, knowing re-election is going to be very difficult. But that only supports what Obama says he stands for (making this a bittersweet win-win, in fact): "Given that grim landscape, Obama and congressional Democrats are making the purest test of whether voters want what they say they do —politicians who follow their conviction no matter what the consequences."

The Republicans are already prepared for the next round of fights, working their angles to put the Democrats in a bad light just as much as the Democrats are trying to do the same to them. In this battle, it's become all how you frame the results, not what the results actually are.

And, in a nice, juicy tidbit, George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum explains why this whole health care debacle has hurt the Republicans a lot — and it was mostly their fault for letting it play out this way. Pay attention especially to how he reveals that the people who got most of the Republican base upset, the talk show hosts, aren't necessarily always looking for the Republicans to do well, either. By presenting an extreme angle in holding out on the Democrats, the Republicans ended up hurting themselves in the long run as health care was passed, when a more moderate approach may have led to some of their opinions making it into law.