Here's A Thought...

...maybe instead of trying to turn health care into Barack Obama's "Waterloo", they should have been doing their jobs. 

You know, serving the American people. 

Instead, this will be the GOP's Waterloo, as David Frum rightly points out here.

Could a deal have been reached? Who knows? But we do know that the gap between this plan and traditional Republican ideas is not very big. The Obama plan has a broad family resemblance to Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts plan. It builds on ideas developed at the Heritage Foundation in the early 1990s that formed the basis for Republican counter-proposals to Clintoncare in 1993-1994.

Barack Obama badly wanted Republican votes for his plan. Could we have leveraged his desire to align the plan more closely with conservative views? To finance it without redistributive taxes on productive enterprise – without weighing so heavily on small business – without expanding Medicaid? Too late now. They are all the law.

No illusions please: This bill will not be repealed. Even if Republicans scored a 1994 style landslide in November, how many votes could we muster to re-open the “doughnut hole” and charge seniors more for prescription drugs? How many votes to re-allow insurers to rescind policies when they discover a pre-existing condition? How many votes to banish 25 year olds from their parents’ insurance coverage? And even if the votes were there – would President Obama sign such a repeal?

We followed the most radical voices in the party and the movement, and they led us to abject and irreversible defeat.

My personal hope is that this forever banishes from politics the idea that playing rank partisan games that delay and deny addressing the problems facing our country just to get back in power somehow serves the American people. 

It doesn't.

And the GOP is on the losing end of the proof of this, fittingly, because the idea started with the scorched earth politics of some guy named Newt Gingrich.