At the two-year mark Friday, nearly everything that Democrats believed about the politics of health care has turned out to be false. And the ramifications for those miscalculations have been huge. They have haunted Obama’s presidency, soured business as usual at the Capitol and upended the conventional wisdom peddled by political strategists, who have rarely been so wrong about something so big.
If professional politicians completely misjudged the politics of the legislation they were passing, think about how well they assessed the policy implications of what they passed!
Of course, some of us are not quite so surprised.
UPDATE: A previous version of this post listed a group of Democrats who were called Pelosi’s “Suicide Squad” before the Obamacare vote. Most of those lawmakers, including Walt Minnick, voted against passage of Obamacare. I regret the error.
Of course, once it passed, none of the lawmakers were willing to sign a discharge petition for either of two bills that would have repealed Obamacare . . . raising the question of whether these lawmakers seriously opposed the legislation, or merely wanted political cover.