“‘You know, I intend to be president for a while and once this bill passes, I own it. And if people look and say, ‘You know what? This hasn’t reduced my costs. My premiums are still going up 25 percent, insurance companies are still jerking me around,” Obama explained.

‘I’m the one who’s going to be held responsible. So I have every incentive to get this right,’ he added.”

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“If he’s having difficulty selling it, that’s because it’s not about ‘health.’ As I’ve written before, the appeal of this issue to him and to Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank, et al., is that governmentalization of health care is the fastest way to a permanent left-of-center political culture — one in which elections are always fought on the Left’s issues and on the Left’s terms, and in which ‘conservative’ parties no longer talk about small government and individual liberty but find themselves retreating to one last pitiful rationale: that they can run the left-wing state more effectively than the Left can…

My sense from Wednesday’s speech is that the president’s gonna shove this through in some form or other. It may cause a little temporary pain in Blue Dog districts in 2010, but the long-term gains will be transformative and irreversible.”

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“Obama ends his 40 min health care speech declaring ‘they can’t stop us – let’s go get this done.'”