Saturday’s vote to create a massive government-run health-insurance program is to Nancy Pelosi and her Democrats what the Battle of Gettysburg was to the South.
It will be remembered as the high point of their unswerving efforts to demand government solutions to every big problem.
It was their most daring stab, deepest into enemy territory.
And the creeks will fill with the political blood of the dead who charged blindly into the angry enemy fire.
Long from now, gauzy-eyed liberals will tear up at the memory of those who pressed forward through the mindless carnage despite knowing full well the sure fate staring back at them.
For years, they will reminisce about which way who voted and how they were never the same after that.
And, like Gettysburg and the Confederacy, the vote will mark the beginning of the end for Pelosi and her doomed crew.
It wasn’t as if she didn’t see it coming.
Pelosi watched last week’s elections — in which her party lost two governorships, even one in Blue Jersey — and, like all her members, saw that no matter how popular President Obama remains even today, he can’t protect anybody in trouble back home.
Unless he’s on the ballot with them.
And next year — when all House members face re-election and Pelosi’s majority is put up for a vote — Obama will not be on the ballot.
That’s exactly why Pelosi, sensing that her members were getting rabbity, shoved through her health-care scheme near midnight on the first weekend she could.
Look, she probably told her nervous members, the first part of this bill is just tax hikes on small businesses, and I know you don’t have a problem with that.
The real disaster isn’t until we get this thing up and running and turn American medicine into the US postal system.
And that, she likely told them, won’t be until after next year’s elections.
That, along with some torturous arm-twisting, got her just the number of votes she needed.
The question now is whether Democrats in the notoriously cautious Senate will mount a similar suicidal charge up the hopeless hill.