Health Reform Hit Partisan 'Buzz Saw': Obama

President's miscalculations include scale, momentum

(NEWSER) - Scott Brown’s Senate victory in Massachusetts is the final nail in the coffin of the Obama administration’s first-year political strategy, John F. Harris and Carol E. Lee write for Politico . The miscalculations cover “three major counts":

• Believing 2008 was a game-changer: The Obama team thought the "election represented something seismic." But "the assumption that Obama would be swimming mostly with the current rather than often against it on issues such as health care, financial regulation and global warming was naive in retrospect."

Supermajority is gone, sure, but so is entire Democratic strategy

(NEWSER) - “While the sun will still come out on Beacon Hill and Capitol Hill” now that Republican Scott Brown has won Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat, Ron Elving writes on NPR , “the political globe will have a new tilt.” Here, six things that have changed:

• The supermajority: That's history.
• Obama's agenda: Everything was predicated on stretching that supermajority to the "max." Goodbye tough climate change bill, financial regulation, immigration reform.

Ramped up State of the Union indicates Senate-skipping strategy

(NEWSER) - The White House has essentially accepted the reality of a Scott Brown win in Massachusetts and is orchestrating some health care reform “ping-pong,” Nate Silver writes, urging the House to vote on the Senate bill as it stands so it can go straight to President Obama’s desk and avoid the bare 59-seat majority in the Senate. Silver sees the earlier-than-expected State of the Union as a chance for Obama to sell the plan to House Dems, and also espouse a populist economic policy for the new Senate makeup. More»

Talk of systemic problems is whining because Obama failed: Krauthammer

(NEWSER) - There’s been a lot of crowing from liberals that the US is “ungovernable” because President Obama has not been able to enact key parts of his domestic agenda. Charles Krauthammer has heard the “usual litany of systemic explanations" before—this moment in history smacks of the Carter administration—cries of “special interests are too powerful” and “the Senate filibuster stymies social progress.” Chill out—the system is fine. It just has a bad leader. More»

Obama can't do big things while avoiding fights

(NEWSER) - The contradictions inherent in what President Obama promised to do have caught up with the Democrats big time with their loss in Massachusetts, writes E.J. Dionne Jr. The president couldn't accomplish big things while also changing the tone of Washington, or deliver sweeping change while also steering clear of ideological battles, Dionne writes in the Washington Post. More»