The Dish

Jonathan Bernstein can see the future:

[T]he main thing to expect is that Republicans will campaign against the health care system.  As they did with the economy from January 20, 2009 on, they will attribute every insurance premium hike, every medical error and every bureaucratic nightmare with insurance forms to the new law, beginning as soon after passage as they can.  Really — someone gets a cough, and Fox News will run an hour-long special about how Obamacare caused it, complete with Beck's sobbing analysis of how the Progressives caused the Great Influenza and Sarah Palin's cutesy gibes at the liberalmedia for ignoring this critical story and picking on her (kids, wardrobe, diction, whatever).

They can try. But I think their creation of reality is making a few Fox Newsers a teensy but uncomfortable.

Dallas, Texas, 1.32 pm

"It reads like a robot was told to split the difference between David Brooks and Bill Kristol," – Alex Pareene on torture loving propagandist Marc Thiessen's latest op-ed.

Today on the Dish we continued to track commentary on the HCR victory. Marc Lynch, Seth Masket, Andrew, and a reader assessed Obama's skills. Readers gave props to Pelosi and praised Stupak.  Reihan and Ross warned about the impact of reform, Yglesias dashed Kristol's hopes to repeal HCR, and Packer sized up Newt's strategy. And we found out how reform can affect you.

Ongoing coverage of the pope's response to the abuse scandal here, here, and here. Jane Mayer tore apart Thiessen's book, Josh Marshall dissed DC group think, and TNR spotted some progress in education reform. A US general blamed gay soldiers for genocide, a congressman compared HCR to communist dictatorships, and Fred Barnes got a Von Hoffman. Recession view here, beard blogging here, and particularly great MHB here.

— C.B.

Marc Lynch hopes:

For most of the last year, I've been torn between two general views of Obama's Middle East policy. One says that he's got no strategy, that his team is making things up as it goes, reacting to events, and has no clear idea of how to achieve his lofty goals. The other says that he's been playing a long game, keeping his eye on the long-term objective while others get lost in the tactics and the public theatrics.  I've gone back and forth, hoping it's the latter while seeing way too many signs of the former.  I still don't know which is right, but last night's  passage of health care reform suggests that maybe, just maybe, his administration really does know how to play a long game… in the Middle East as well as on domestic priorities.

Linkage, strategy, linkage. Does Obama have more clout now to deal with Netanyahu or Putin?

Support for nuclear power hits a new high.

TNC lists his:

Man, looking back over this list, I really need to read some books about white people. My canon is culturally biased and reflects the perspective of sheltered African-American who is embarrassingly ignorant of the White Experience.

Heh. Friedersdorf also plays along. Ezra Klein places periodicals and blogs above books.

Axelrod says Democrats will run on health care reform. I think they'll do very well on it, and have said so for a while now – especially given how easy it will be to point to Republicans and say: they did nothing. "We helped that woman with MS to get an insurance package that keeps her functioning!" Think of those drug ads, showing how the afflicted turn their lives around; now think of them as Democratic ads contrasting the survival of the sick with screaming tea-partiers or mockers of those with Parkinson's. George Packer outlines Newt's strategy:

Yesterday Newt Gingrich outlined the Republican strategy going forward, saying that the Democrats “will have destroyed their party much as Lyndon Johnson shattered the Democratic Party for forty years” by signing civil rights into law. Leave aside the deep cynicism of this view of racial equality: Gingrich was expressing the Republican belief that health-care reform will be so unpopular that it will reduce the Democrats to minority status for two generations.

(In the House debate, Republican after Republican excoriated the Democrats for defying the will of the American people—as if the elections of 2006 and 2008 were inconsequential compared to a couple of last fall’s Rasmussen polls on health care.)

But Gingrich’s analysis is based on a flawed analogy. Civil rights brought an oppressed minority of Americans closer to equality, and—as Johnson knew—was so hated across the South that it was bound to cost the Democrats the region. Health-care reform, if it does what its supporters claim, will humanize a system in which the vast majority of Americans feel trapped.

If this is how the GOP reacts – rather than proposing a reform package for the bill – they will be jumping off yet another electoral cliff.

Ross contemplates whether Republicans should have proposed a more limited plan after the Massachusetts upset:

[The Republicans] may well be vindicated on the politics this November. But as far as the policy goes … well, from a conservative perspective, it’s hard to see how at least floating some sort of post-Massachusetts compromise could have produced a worse outcome than the bill the House passed yesterday.

Ross, your party isn’t interested in policy. Or government. They’re about self-expression in a cocooned ideology. I wish they were all like you. But they’re not.