Peter Beinart argues that President Obama has changed the Democratic Party (it “will never be the same”) by his decision to move unambiguously to the left on healthcare:

He passed a stimulus bill that Republicans called too big but many liberals called too small. He altered some of Bush’s policies on civil liberties, but kept others. He sent more troops to Afghanistan, but set a deadline for their withdrawal. He pushed a big health care reform, but didn’t fight for a public option. A year into Obama’s presidency, the Democratic Party’s two factions could each still credibly claim him as its own, which is to say, the decade-old argument lingered on.

Now it is over. When Scott Brown won his Senate seat, he made Obama choose. On the one hand, he handed the White House an excuse to abandon comprehensive reform and return to the incremental, small-bore approach that Clinton pursued after 1994. The Brown victory, in fact, seemed to illustrate the “don’t scare the bear” theory perfectly. Obama had passed the stimulus and bailed out the banks and taken over part of the auto industry and for the American people, it was too much liberal activism too fast.

Polls not only showed Americans turning against Obama’s health care bill, they showed them turning against big government more generally. Continuing to pursue comprehensive reform in this inhospitable environment, warned former Carter pollster Patrick Caddell and former Clinton pollster Douglas Schoen, in language that echoed “the Politics of Evasion,” would bring political calamity. “Wishing, praying or pretending” that the American people support health care reform more than they do, they insisted, “will not change these outcomes.”

Superjumbo Democrats, by contrast, argued that the public wasn’t so much anti-reform as they were anti-the legislative process that had produced reform. But more fundamentally, they argued that the American people would respect Democrats for not backing down in the face of adversity. The party might still lose seats this fall, but over time health care reform would prove popular, and the party’s willingness to fight for it would strengthen the Democratic brand.

Why exactly Obama — advised by David Axelrod, Rahm Emmanuel and Valerie Jarrett — decided to double down on health care remains unclear. But it’s a good bet that President Hillary Clinton — advised by Mark Penn — would have acted differently. And in acting the way he did, Obama has turned himself into a superjumbo Democrat. For the foreseeable future, he has forfeited any chance of bridging the red-blue divide.

It’s interesting to remember back to the week of the election in 2008, when the incoming administration took great pains to position itself as post-partisan. That seems like such a long time ago now.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 16th, 2010 at 10:37 am and is filed under business, Democrats, General, Polling, Republicans. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.