Andrew Sullivan - Obama’s in the ER but he’ll get his reforms

The right’s healthcare scare tactics are hitting home – but to little purpose

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So, tactically, Obama is on the defensive. Strategically? Again, he is stronger than he now appears. When the health insurance bill is passed and elderly Americans are not rounded up into concentration camps and granny isn’t subjected to euthanasia, and when many uninsured people gain a peace of mind they have never felt before, and people become able to change job without fearing loss of insurance, the Republican scare tactics may come to seem absurd.

Moreover, the Republicans have failed to lay out their proposals for dealing with the same problems. There are some worthwhile ideas out there: guaranteeing insurance only for catastrophic or chronic illness, vouchers for free check-ups and tax-free health savings accounts to pay for medicines and routine treatment. These proposals go largely unheard, though, drowned out by anti-Obama scaremongering. A party that has tried to kill what may well become a popular measure and has offered no alternative is not thinking strategically.

Imagine next year. Obama has a healthcare plan and a carbon emissions scheme in place, both of which duck some core difficult questions but are still big moves away from the era of George W Bush. His stimulus, designed to kick in with more force in 2010, helps to push an already recovering economy into growth. The troops begin to come back from Iraq in larger numbers. Stocks maintain momentum; banks keep paying back their bailout money, giving the government a profit; and Obama calls a fiscal-responsibility summit to begin to chart a path back to budget sanity.

It won’t turn out that easily, but it’s a plausible scenario. The strategy of pushing much of the stimulus money into an election year was, in retrospect, a shrewd if cynical ploy from Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff. The Democrats will almost certainly lose seats in the Senate in the 2010 mid-term elections, as incumbent parties do, but even in the worst-case (and highly unlikely) scenario, a Republican takeover of the House, Obama’s options are no worse than Clinton’s were in 1994. Clinton, you may recall, failed to get healthcare and yet was re-elected handsomely.......