Ezra Klein:
The poll is a Gallup poll, and as they say, that's a sharp improvement over the pre-passage numbers. On 3/9, they asked whether you'd advise your representative to vote for the bill. About 45% said yes, while 48% said no. So there's been a flip from plurality opposition to plurality support. This is, of course, just one poll, amd soon we'll know if it's a general trend.
Gallup has the partisan breakdown, with indies evenly split:
Passage of healthcare reform was a clear political victory for President Obama and his allies in Congress. While it also pleases most of his Democratic base nationwide, it is met with greater ambivalence among independents and with considerable antipathy among Republicans. Whether these groups' views on the issue harden or soften in the coming months could be crucial to how healthcare reform factors into this year's midterm elections. Given that initial public reaction to Sunday's vote is more positive than recent public opinion about passing a healthcare reform bill, it appears some softening has already occurred.
Maureen Dowd:
One minute they were legislative losers, squabbling and scrambling for the off-ramps. The next they were history-makers, sharing chest bumps and goose bumps at the White House. How had the lofty president and the wily speaker suddenly steered them off Jimmy Carter Highway and onto F.D.R. Drive?
Tom Friedman: Obama's health care victory? It's all about me, so I want my own party. Let's call it the tea party of the radical middle. And let's see who remembers this column in six months.
EJ Dionne:
In its current incarnation, conservatism has taken on an angry crankiness. It is caught up in a pseudo-populism that true conservatism should mistrust -- what on Earth would Bill Buckley have made of "death panels"? The creed is caught up in a suspicion of all reform that conservatives of the Edmund Burke stripe have always warned against.
Authentic conservatism is better than this.
I agree. It's easy to forget that there are real arguments on the conservative side that are lost when teabaggers and Sarah Palin are the only face of the GOP. Where are the Bill Buckleys of the 21st Century? But there are conservative ideas in this health care bill. The inability of conservatives to admit it is a sign of how radical they have become.
Want some examples? When David Brooks wrote yesterday's column (covered in yesterday's APR), he got some really interesting comments. Here's one:
The blame for a weak bill rests not on the Democrats for confronting this issue, but on the Republican caucus, which forfeited a golden opportunity to guide this policy to a more effective conclusion, choosing instead to gamble on Obama's total failure. I support health reforms that Republicans favor, and am disgusted that they wasted such a real opportunity to get something out of this, which would have made the whole reform package better. When one party has to carry the other around like dead weight, don't expect legislative miracles. Step up and compromise Republicans. Small government doesn't mean absence of governing.
Harold Meyerson:
Of course, none of this would have happened had the president decided to "go small" after Republican Scott Brown won the Massachusetts special Senate election in January, depriving Democrats of their 60-vote Senate supermajority. The president's insistence on a big bill that guaranteed nearly universal coverage -- a position he was encouraged to maintain by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who played Margaret Thatcher to Obama's George H.W. Bush in this tale -- is what motivated the base organizations to go all out for the bill, even as it required the White House to reawaken its own massive group of supporters. It also ensured that these organizations, which are critical to turning out the base in November, will actually be motivated to do so.
