Republicans and Health Care

Via Jonathan Chait:

When you’ve turned the som­no­lent, relent­lessly cen­trist Indi­ana Senator[Evan Bayh]  into a rag­ing par­ti­san, you’ve really done some­thing. The Repub­li­cans eschewed a halfway com­pro­mise and put all their chips on an all or noth­ing cam­paign to defeat health care and Obama’s pres­i­dency. It was an auda­cious gam­ble. They lost. In the end, they’ll walk away with noth­ing. The Repub­li­cans may gain some more seats in 2010 by their total obstruc­tion, but the sub­stan­tive pol­icy defeat they’ve been dealt will last for decades.

It’s pol­i­tics, set in Brown­ian motion. Since I seri­ously doubt that there will ever be 60 Repub­li­cans in the Sen­ate with­out dra­matic changes in the party’s com­po­si­tion, let’s see if they can ever achieve any­thing of this magnitude.

20 December 2009 – 4:24 pm | By Benjamin Daniels | Posted in Health Care, Politics | Comments (176)