A regular correspondent, B. J., writes:

If no health-insurance bill is passed (I never figured out why they insisted on calling it a “health care” bill when it mainly regulates health insurance, but whatever), then I suppose we’ll be treated to the notion (already out there, really) that Congress was only inches away from passing a major bill when MA voters destroyed it all by voting in a Republican.
But here’s the problem with that:
1. The Senate, with exactly 60 votes, has passed a bill; the House, having barely passed its own bill, is now refusing to pass the Senate bill even with those changes that could be made through the reconciliation process. Accordingly, since it knows that nothing that is better than the Senate bill is going to get 60 votes, House Democrats are saying that they prefer the status quo to the Senate bill. So what makes anyone think that a bill that, in the view of the House, improved the status quo, could have passed the House and gotten 60 votes in the Senate?
2. Let’s assume that #1 is wrong and a bill could have gotten 218 votes in the House and 60 in the Senate. Well, aside from the fact that they always knew that the 60-vote Senate was very vulnerable (Kennedy/Byrd to illness; Lieberman/Nelson to politics), they knew the moment that the MA special election date was set that they could lose the election, purely because it was an open seat. You can’t ever believe that you have an open seat “in the bag” because you have no way of knowing whether your candidate isn’t going to screw up or have some scandal pop up. (You shouldn’t even think that an incumbent has it in the bag, either, but there’s really no excuse in an open election.) And they certainly knew by around Christmas that Coakley was genuinely vulnerable. And they still couldn’t get a deal. If you can’t get a deal done with a gun to your head, then you’re not going to get a deal.
3. Let’s assume #1 and #2 is wrong (#2 because Coakley had the election “in the bag”). What is clear is that the longer the debate goes on, the more difficult it is to pass because the less time there is for vulnerable Democrats to persuade their constituents that a deal that polls badly was actually a good idea. And if they can’t get a deal with the MA election pending, the pressure lets up again after the MA special election (assuming Coakley wins), and then what? What compels them to get a deal done? SOTU? Why? No – it just drags on and becomes ever more difficult to pass.