Well, yeah. Because 40 Republicans (now 41) wouldn’t stand foresquare opposed to any reform broader than eliminating the right to sue for malpractice and gutting the ability of states to regulate health insurance practices.

If a Republican President proposed efforts to expand direct Governmental involvement in moving towards Universal Healthcare, he’d probably be able to drag 10-15 Republican senators along. Obama has absolutely no chance of getting more than one or two, and the odds are that he has no chance of getting any.

And we would have a better health care reform package too.

First of all, Obama remains relatively popular in Mass. and even Scott Brown says he does not want to end RomneyCare which basically is a more liberal version of the Obama health plan! As for opinion polls, those change from month to month. Half a year ago a majority of Americans approved of health care reform after all.

> People are concerned about jobs, having money to pay bills,
> feed their families, and the economy.

That’s more like it…
People are suffering and they take it out on the party in power. I don’t think President John McCain / VP Sarah Palin would be in any better shape than Obama currently is, if they somehow had won the 2008 elections.

> In Obama’s first year of office, the country hasn’t gotten better. The $787 billion stimulus,
> of which only a third has been spent, was supposed to create jobs and stop unemployment from
> topping 8%. But it hasn’t created jobs and unemployment has reached 10%.

Even most center-right economists regard the stimulus as a good thing! Without it, the job losses may have been even worse. It would be insane to cut government spending on e.g. unemployment benefits during the worst recession since the 1930s, even if it increases the deficit in the short term.

> Scott Brown’s election to the Senate is good news for Americans because it will help bring
> the country’s policies back towards the center where the majority of Americans are politically
> (37% depending on the poll).

After two decades of bitterness and partisanship, it seems quite unlikely that most Representatives or Senators are centrists… Due to low voter turnout and the first-past-the-post “winner takes all” format, most elected politicians in Congress are now either staunch conservatives or liberals (or at least they keep voting that way).

The Senate Democrats’ health care reform attempt is not at all some wild-eyed liberal project! It is far more conservative than Nixon’s mid-1970s proposal, which BTW was MORE liberal than Clinton’s 1994 reform. It in fact seems to be too “right wing” for SCOTT BROWN of all people, and lack of enthusiasm on the far *Left* now seems to be a major problem. The NetRoots *and* the TeaPartyrs both absolutely hate the health care bill, but for fundamentally different reasons. If the political system was working, this would be regarded as a centrist initiative. Yet Ben Nelson, Max Baucus and Joe Lieberman (and Olympia Snowe too, if she’d dared to stray off the GOP reservation after the Dems basically addressed all her complaints about the bill…) are now disliked by everybody. It’s crazy, really.

MARCU$