Collective Conscious

Via Escha­ton:

I hope Dems in Con­gress take a moment or two to think about the pol­i­tics of health care reform. Once it passes they will own all of it, not just the reforms. Repub­li­cans will turn every health insur­ance hor­ror story in a story about how the Dems’ HCR is a tremen­dous awful hor­ri­ble fail­ure, whether or not it has any­thing to do with spe­cific reforms enacted.

All of this is my sub­tle way of sug­gest­ing they’d bet­ter pass some­thing that peo­ple like and that works, because oth­er­wise every insur­ance com­pany dick move will be their fault.

I think only a select few Democ­rats will really own it in that sense. Blanche Lin­coln is in enough trou­ble already, which prob­a­bly accounts for much of her decreased vis­i­bil­ity in main­stream media. Mary Lan­drieu isn’t up for reelec­tion until 2014, by which time her state should see eco­nomic recov­ery — a much big­ger issue for her there. Most seri­ous pro­gres­sives are in safely left-​​leaning states and fought/​compromised for lib­eral pro­vi­sions, so at worst they’ll face a pri­mary chal­lenge for not being lib­eral enough.

Joe Lieber­man, my own sen­a­tor (sigh), will def­i­nitely have to con­tend with any­thing that insur­ance com­pa­nies are able to pull off. Don’t worry, I’ll vote for the other guy, but with pre­vi­ous Demo­c­ra­tic oppo­nent Ned Lam­ont weigh­ing a run for the gov­er­nor­ship, it’s not clear who that will be yet.

And Harry Reid def­i­nitely has to worry.