Ultimately, the Baucus negotiations and the many one-on-one conversations between Obama and Snowe earned the support of not a single Senate Republican, but the delay bought the GOP precious time to organize opposition and focus attention on the messy legislative process.
"As I look back, it was a waste of time dealing with" Snowe, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid told the New York Times, "because she had no intention of ever working anything out."
Although many of her demands were met such as dropping the "public option" from the initial "insurance exchange" Snowe ultimately justified her support for the Republican filibuster against health-care reform by saying she wanted to continue talking.
The unified GOP opposition to the bill put Democrats at the mercy of their most conservative members as well as Connecticut's Independent Joe Lieberman, a neocon who opposed Obama's election and seemed to delight in bedeviling the Senate leadership.
As Reid labored to craft a compromise bill which was tailored to please Lieberman by replacing the "public option" with an earlier Lieberman-backed plan to expand Medicare coverage to people 55 to 64 Lieberman then went on the Sunday talk shows to announce that he would join a Republican filibuster if his own Medicare expansion plan weren't dropped, too.
After watching Lieberman on TV, Reid reportedly told aides "he double-crossed me." However, desperate for a Senate bill, White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel informed Reid that he had no choice but to abandon his compromise and accede to Lieberman's new position.
As the health-care reform was reshaped in ways increasingly favorable to the insurance industry, Obama got the worst of both worlds. His supporters were demoralized and angry, while his opponents got to portray the legislation as an overly complicated "government takeover" of health care.
The Populist Banner
Citing the Wall Street bailouts and the convoluted health-reform bill, Republicans and their Tea Party allies swooped in to claim the banner of populism, with the help of right-wing demagogues like Fox News' Glenn Beck and radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh.
Meanwhile, the American Left remained the marginal force that it has been for decades, heaping blame on Obama but doing little to build a media/think tank infrastructure that could make a sustained case to the American people or come close to competing with the well-oiled right-wing machine.
So, what can Obama do now to salvage his presidency? Here are some of the hard facts and his hard choices ahead:
Losing the Massachusetts Senate seat means that Obama's notion of some "responsible" governing coalition is dead. Obama's dream of ushering in a post-partisan era that could reach across party lines to address the pressing needs of the United States was always naà ¯ve at best.
The GOP knows that its political fortunes rest on the destruction of Obama and his presidency. As was obvious a year ago, the Republicans simply dusted off the strategy they used against Bill Clinton in 1993-94, obstructing what they could and relying on the powerful right-wing media to demonize the new President and rally their "base."
In 1994, the GOP's scorched-earth strategy led to a Republican takeover of Congress. And the GOP victory in Massachusetts confirms the efficacy of this approach, again.
Whether he likes it or not, Barack Obama is in a political war and he is losing.
Though the time is late, the President must toughen his rhetoric if he hopes to recover. He will have to convince average Americans that he is on their side and that the Republicans are the ones on the side of the rich and powerful, that they are the real defenders of the elites.
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