David Axelrod tells the Huffington Post that health-care reform passed because Republicans downgraded to DEFCON 2 after Scott Brown’s surprise victory in the Massachusetts Senate race:

“Some of the steam went out of the opposition after that,” Axelrod said. “I think that people felt like they had made a statement. Perhaps they felt like they had killed health care reform… They thought the fight was over. And that [the president] couldn’t now succeed. I do believe that. And it is almost as if they had made the statement that they thought they had stopped the thing. And so it created a breathing space for us to regroup.”

And for those of us wondering whether the administration took any lessons from the Brown victory? They did: Scott Brown won because people didn’t like the Cornhusker Kickback:

“[Massachusetts] raised issues that we had to confront,” Axelrod explained. “What had we done to contribute to some of that unrest? And obviously there was tremendous unhappiness about the Nebraska deal and this gave us a chance to address some of those flaws.”

In a dizzying display of his powers of positive thinking, Axelrod suggests that Obama’s tactical defeat in Massachusetts, like pretty much every tactical defeat Obama has ever suffered, showed that people hadn’t had enough Obama.

“It’s an analogy I used the other day,” Axelrod said. “I always believed in the presidential race they just didn’t want to shut the race down because they liked Obama, they thought he had potential. But he was new. He was four years out of the State Senate and they weren’t prepared to hand him an early knockout. They wanted him to go through the entire battle, and they wanted to judge him based on how he performed on that long hard road.
“And actually, with Massachusetts, I think people wanted to see this debate go on for a while and they wanted to see our suppositions tested and retested. But what Massachusetts did at the end of the day was that it persuaded people on our side of the fight not to make the perfect the enemy of the good. And it really rallied our base behind the president’s proposal.”

More here.