The Second Year Begins

If you have time to read only one political blog entry today, make it this one by former White House speech writer, and now editor, Hendrick Herzberg: "One Year: Beware of Sudden Downdrafts." We don't always agree with Herzberg, but we always pay attention to his keen insights. A small taste:

That Obama let the “outside game” part of the health-care drama get away from him, so focussed was he on the “inside game” of trying to force the legislative elephant through the Congressional keyhole, can no longer be denied. He and his team can also be faulted for the political (and perhaps substantive) inattention that has allowed the right to profit handsomely from the economic disaster that their policies, not Obama’s, brought about.

Whether yesterday’s upset in Massachusetts turns out to be a catastrophe or merely a setback now depends largely on the grown-upness, or lack of it, of liberals in the House of Representatives. I don’t see any way out of the darkness right now other than for the House to tighten its stomach muscles, pass the Senate version of the health-care bill A.S.A.P., and move on to jobs and the economy. The Senate health-care bill, however inferior to the House version, is vastly superior to the status quo. The only alternative I can discern is no bill at all—a political, substantive, and humanitarian failure that would reverberate for a generation.

There's more, including a wonderfully succinct summary of President Obama's considerable accomplishments in just twelve months, given what Herzberg accurately terms the "systemic grotesqueries like the filibuster... ."