Am I wrong to think this shows how totally detached the D.C./N.Y.-centric press is from the rest of the country, and how the Left believes too many of the press-clippings it plants?

People who admired Ted Kennedy are already in favor of socialized medicine; people who despised Ted Kennedy may actually have preferred socialized medicine (a notion they deeply dislike) to him. That’s at best a wash and more likely a slight net negative. Everyone else is indifferent to Kennedy, and in any event their health care is a hell of a lot more important to them than whatever fleeting thought they might give Kennedy one way or the other — which is a big net negative for socialized medicine, but one on which Kennedy’s name irrelevant.

Maybe I’m missing something, but I just don’t see how this helps the Left. If I were a Lefty and I could be cold-blooded about the whole thing, I’d probably think attaching Kennedy’s name was a bad idea. Even with his numbers tanking, Obama is still more personally popular with the country as a whole than Kennedy was, and he is unavoidably the guy the Left has to rely on. That makes him the only name that matters, regardless of what they call this thing.

Why does Obamacare necessarily need a person’s name attached to it, anyway? Why can’t they just call it, say, a “Man-Caused Disaster”? Or maybe a “domestic contingency operation” — or, better, “a domestic contingency to prevent you from getting an operation”?