Over a year ago, Bill Clinton offered Democrats at the Netroots Nation a Nancy Pelosi take on their political prospects by advising them to pass ObamaCare and see all the popularity that would be in it. Now, facing a potentially historic meltdown, Bill Clinton has another message for Democrats — my bad (via RightNework):

Former president Bill Clinton, a champion of healthcare reform, admitted on Sunday that he made the wrong prediction about the popularity of President Obama’s healthcare bill.

Initially, Clinton had predicted that the polls in favor of Democrats would be boosted as soon as the legislation was signed into law. Instead, Clinton said on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” his prediction was wrong for two reasons.

“First of all, the benefits of the bill are spread out of three or four years. It takes a long time to implement. And secondly, there has been an enormous and highly effective attack on it,” he said.

It’s not just the highly effective attack on it.  It’s also because people didn’t want a government takeover of health care in 2010 any more than they wanted it in 1993.  It’s hard to understand why Democrats took Bill Clinton’s advice seriously in the first place.  After all, Clinton himself didn’t take it at the time; he dropped HillaryCare and moved back to the center, and won his next election because of it.

Furthermore, Clinton’s wrong about the benefits not arriving for the next three or four years.  The White House front-loaded the benefits that people liked most about the bill so that they would take effect before the midterms.  The geniuses in the Obama administration didn’t consider the fact that insurers would have to increase premiums as the mandates took effect, though, so we’ve also been treated to a preview of just how ObamaCare will bend the cost curve upward rather than downward.

People don’t like ObamaCare because they know that creating another massive government entitlement program is the wrong prescription for America.  The only people who thought of it as a cure rather than a symptom of Beltway Syndrome were those already at Stage Four of the disease on Capitol Hill.