Conservative David Frum describes it best
Healthcare Bill turns into Republicans Waterloo
Waterloo | FrumForum
Conservatives and Republicans today suffered their most crushing legislative defeat since the 1960s.
Its hard to exaggerate the magnitude of the disaster. Conservatives may cheer themselves that theyll compensate for todays expected vote with a big win in the November 2010 elections. But:
(1) Its a good bet that conservatives are over-optimistic about November by then the economy will have improved and the immediate goodies in the healthcare bill will be reaching key voting blocs.
(2) So what? Legislative majorities come and go. This healthcare bill is forever. A win in November is very poor compensation for this debacle now.
At the beginning of this process we made a strategic decision: unlike, say, Democrats in 2001 when President Bush proposed his first tax cut, we would make no deal with the administration. No negotiations, no compromise, nothing. We were going for all the marbles. This would be Obamas Waterloo just as healthcare was Clintons in 1994.
This time, when we went for all the marbles, we ended with none.
Could a deal have been reached? Who knows? But we do know that the gap between this plan and traditional Republican ideas is not very big. The Obama plan has a broad family resemblance to Mitt Romneys Massachusetts plan.
Barack Obama badly wanted Republican votes for his plan. Could we have leveraged his desire to align the plan more closely with conservative views? To finance it without redistributive taxes on productive enterprise without weighing so heavily on small business without expanding Medicaid? Too late now. They are all the law.
No illusions please: This bill will not be repealed. How many votes to re-allow insurers to rescind policies when they discover a pre-existing condition? How many votes to banish 25 year olds from their parents insurance coverage? And even if the votes were there would President Obama sign such a repeal?
We followed the most radical voices in the party and the movement, and they led us to abject and irreversible defeat.
There were leaders who knew better, who would have liked to deal. But they were trapped. Conservative talkers on Fox and talk radio had whipped the Republican voting base into such a frenzy that deal-making was rendered impossible. How do you negotiate with somebody who wants to murder your grandmother? Or more exactly with somebody whom your voters have been persuaded to believe wants to murder their grandmother
So todays defeat for free-market economics and Republican values is a huge win for the conservative entertainment industry. Their listeners and viewers will now be even more enraged, even more frustrated, even more disappointed in everybody except the responsibility-free talkers on television and radio. For them, its mission accomplished. For the cause they purport to represent, its Waterloo all right: ours.