Big Government

No one can quite remember when a party in power has been so determined to self-destruct, with the speaker as provocateur, egging everyone on. Rep. Mike Honda, a Californian of Japanese descent, objects to some of the metaphors applied to Mzz Pelosi's mission of death by obsession, but to neutral observers -- assuming any are left -- her execution of the president's obsession looks like the Bataan death march, or at least a ride to the gallows in a Toyota.

Everything the Democrats are doing is turning to mud, or maybe even the smelly stuff wives accuse husbands of tracking into the house. Barack Obama even chose this week to pick an unnecessary fight with Israel, our only true friend in the Middle East. When Joe Biden quickly wore out his welcome in Jerusalem, he was brought back to Washington to employ his considerable Irish charm to entertain the Irish prime minister, Brian Cowen, who dropped in for a St. Patrick's Day visit to the White House. Nobody could mess up such a jovial occasion, even with beer dyed green for the occasion.

Nancy Pelosi, the dominatrix of the Democrats, boasts that she has the votes to prevail, but if she does, it's a puzzle why she and the president keep putting off the vote. If she has the votes, why did the president postpone leaving for Guam, Indonesia and Australia to stay here to deal with a few congressional arms that won't stay twisted? It could be he needs more time to work on his apology to our Islamic friends in Indonesia, but if he's having trouble with his teleprompter, surely he could find the tape of his earlier remarks in Cairo and recycle those.

The Democratic dilemma is far more serious than that. The president and the dominatrix don't have the votes. Even the most slavishly loyal Democratic congressmen can't decide whether to save the president or save themselves. Being human, they feel the instinct for self-preservation. This being Washington, the president's plea to "do the right thing" rings hollow indeed. Why shouldn't he "do the right thing" and dump his radical scheme and start over?

There's abundant evidence that Mr. Obama's toxic agenda seems to be disintegrating before our very eyes. Democrats with a bad case of nerves (this includes most of them) finally admit that ObamaCare has "problems." The president postponed his Asia trip to stay home to twist arms. Not a good sign. Several Democratic office-holders in Missouri suddenly had business elsewhere when the president showed up for a rally in St. Louis last week. Robin Carnahan, the Missouri secretary of state who is the leading Democratic candidate in pursuit of the Senate seat that Kit Bond, a Republican, is relinquishing, wanted ever so to be there but she had to wash her hair, or buy a stamp, or couldn't find a taxi to get to the airport for a flight home. Or whatever.

Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, the most vulnerable Democratic incumbent, got roughed up at a tea party and is running now against the Democratic Party. "I don't answer to my party," she says. "I answer to Arkansas." Actually, she slavishly answered to her party until she stumbled into the tea party, and got a little religion. Her free fall in the public-opinion polls continues.

Mr. Obama is loath to say the word "reconciliation," because he knows "reconciliation" is this season's synonym for suicide. So he warns of the danger of flip-floppery. His health care "reform" passed the House by only five votes, and deaths and resignations have reduced the margin. There's no margin left for flip-floppery. That's the message the president's desperate lobbyists are taking to Capitol Hill. He wants a vote before Congress departs for its Easter vacation at the end of the month, and promises his loyalists that he will apply enough flim-flammery over the next fortnight to discourage flip-floppery.

The president's men remind wavering congressmen of Sen. John Kerry's boast that he voted for the second war in Iraq before he voted against it, and everyone knows how that turned out. They could draw a lesson from Bill Clinton as well, who once tried to explain away his support for sending troops to the first Gulf War as a straddle: "I was for it but I was really for those who were against it."

The president was full of self-righteous talk, mostly about himself, and he twice felt it necessary to remind everyone that he's the president, recalling Richard Nixon's bizarre reassurance that he was not a crook. Some things are self-evident, and if they're not, such things are usually not true. We can stipulate that, like it or not, he's the president.

The Democrats relished the opportunity to portray the Republicans as the wrinkled party of "no," a crabby relic of the 20th century, devoid of anything that anybody could want, and Barack Obama's low-church eloquence would melt skepticism like butter on warm toast. But it didn't happen. Setting out the idea of a plain and simple alternative to Obamacare -- smaller measures to reform, taken step by step -- the Republicans sounded like the party of common sense, purveyors of the kind of kitchen-table solution that would work a lot better than an elaborate welfare-state scheme.

Deprived of his teleprompter, the president was having a devil of a time not only staying awake but trying to shape the concentrated argle-bargle to fit his agenda. He couldn't get a speech going, try as he might, and though he had promised to meet Republicans as equals at one point the Democrats were getting about twice more speaking time as the Republicans. "I don't count my time," he said, "because I'm the president."

The Republicans had obviously taken heed of early warnings they were speeding into a trap, and came prepared for battle this time. The soft-spoken Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee particularly rattled the president early on, not so much with his assertions about the costs of Obamacare but by taking the president on as an equal, armed with facts a little more than equal to the Democratic party-line rhetoric. The president pointedly mocked Sen. John McCain, who had delivered a brief soliloquy about how Obamacare was wrong to treat some Americans better than others. "Uh, let me just make this point," the president replied. "We're not campaigning anymore. Uh, John. The election's over."

The president's idea was to invite the Republicans in to talk about compromises, actual and authentic, and work out bipartisan health care reform. The president will put it on television, naturally, where he can make a speech. The entire session is supposed to last six hours, and the president can use up some of them to demonstrate his rhetorical prowess.

The president says he doesn't want to make a theatrical production of it, but since the president himself is a theatrical production, it's difficult to see how the great health care summit can be anything but. Mr. Obama is fond of saying how he wants his presidency to be "transparent," and he's making it easy to see through what he and the Democrats are doing. The Democratic task at hand is to animate a corpse with mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, and who wants to volunteer for that? But Mr. Obama is determined to prop it up for a vote.

With disapproval of their health care "reform" running almost to 60 percent in the public-opinion polls, the Democrats set themselves up for disaster in Massachusetts. Scott Brown is smart, good-looking and knows his (Boston baked) beans, but it was his spirited and unapologetic opposition to ObamaCare that got him to the brink of a career in the U.S. Senate. He was helped by the pathetic Martha Coakley, the most inept Massachusetts candidate since Michael Dukakis tanked in the presidential campaign of '88.

She has "the kind of political stupidity it takes for a Democrat to lose a Senate race in Massachusetts," observes columnist Michael Graham in the Boston Herald. "You've got to run an absolute disaster of a campaign to lose to a Republican [in Massachusetts]. And that's what Martha Coakley delivered. It wasn't the Hindenburg or the Titanic. It was the Hindenburg crashing into the Titanic."

When the inevitable howling erupted in Nebraska, all the senator could come up with was a variation on the oldest excuse in Washington: "I didn't do it, and maybe I won't do it again."

The senator's profile in phony determination to prevent federal financing of abortion earned him rebuke and scorn from abortion foes and advocates alike. What angered everyone was how easily he took the bribe, and how public the transaction was. After all the declarations of undying dedication to "conviction" and "principles," when Barack Obama offered the deal he offered no one else, to pay for the expanded Medicare costs for the state of Nebraska and let's forget about abortion, the senator capitulated with enthusiasm.

He leaves behind a chaotic debate over his health care "reform," a debate awash in irony, confusion and incredulity. The next stop is farce. ObamaCare, which the president promised would be a simple, thrifty, economical cure-all for the health care system, runs to 2,074 pages that a roomful of Philadelphia lawyers (or worse, Washington lawyers) couldn't parse. But what everybody does understand is that it will cost $2.5 trillion - that's a "t," not a "b" - that vastly expands the government bureaucracy, raises taxes and premiums on private insurance and devastates Medicare, and probably only make things worse. Other than that, it's a start.

"And here's the outrageous part," says Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the leader of the Senate Republicans. "At the end of this rush, they want us to vote on a bill that no one outside the majority leader's office has even seen. The final bill we'll vote on isn't even the one we've had on the floor. It's the deal Democrats have been trying to work out in private."