Despite holding a commanding majority in both houses of Congress, and with the full resources of the federal government at their backs, President Obama and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had to bargain and barter for every last vote yesterday in order to pass their health-care overhaul.
But it worked.
ObamaCare passed the House last night, is headed back to the Senate and — barring the totally unexpected — will soon be the law of the land.
Confusion reigned all day long, particularly over the votes of Rep. Bart Stupak and other pro-life Democrats, as the White House offered an impressive-sounding — but legally meaningless — executive order designed to give them political cover for supporting the bill.
The bill was thickly larded not only with fiscal gimmicks but with hugely expensive, state-specific deals to compensate timorous Democrats for risking their careers and climbing on board.
That the Democrats had to struggle so hard to bring even their own into line demonstrated more clearly than any public-opinion poll the breadth of the public’s disenchantment with ObamaCare — if not with health-care reform itself.
Still, as the final vote approached, Pelosi and House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer clearly had enough votes to pass the bill — even as Republicans maneuvered to block the bill in the Senate.
That seems a vain hope.
So, presently, Democrats will be living with the political consequences — even as the nation struggles with what promises to be epic economic fallout over the next decade.
As former Congressional Budget Office head Douglas Holtz-Eakin wrote in a column published in Sunday’s New York Times: “If you strip out all the gimmicks and budgetary games and rework the calculus, a wholly different picture emerges: The health care reform legislation would raise, not lower, federal deficits, by $562 billion.”
How could it be otherwise: No new government program ever reduces government spending, and this one was quite correctly being compared yesterday to the New Deal in its scope and reach.
And, for better or for worse, the New Deal turned America’s relationship with the federal government on its head — shoving Washington’s hand into the average taxpayers pocket more deeply than ever before.
Whether Obama and Pelosi can buy the American people as cheaply as they bought the House remains to be seen. Certainly the bill is chock-a-block with goodies that will sound terrific — or will until the bill arrives at some point in the not-too-distant future.
But soon will come November, and — perhaps — a day of reckoning.
As veteran Democratic pollster Pat Caddell put it: “The people who are opposing [health-care reform] are holding tea parties. The Democrats are holding a Kool-Aid party. This is political Jonestown.”
Time will tell.