ObamaCare's threat to liberalism

Obama’s challenge is now nothing less than to assure that the cycle of progressivism he presumed to usher in, and the period of renewed faith and confidence in the transformative powers of government that he promised, does not die aborning. That will be no easy task.

“Unlike the Republican agenda, the Democratic agenda does not work unless people have a certain level of trust in the competence of the government to act on their behalf,” said William Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, who 25 years ago helped launch the centrist “New Democratic” agenda that brought the Democrats back from years in the presidential wilderness. “That is, if you will, the Democratic proposition. It’s not to say that the government should do everything, but it is to say there’s an indispensable — and not necessarily small — role for government at every level.”…

“Case studies are going to be written about this for years to come,” said David Gergen, director of the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard’s Kennedy School and a bipartisan veteran of three White House staffs. “I’m not sure people are ever going to be able to totally unravel this story — it beggars belief. It reveals a level — I think it is rooted to some significant degree in the insularity of this White House. There are terrific people working there, and the president is a man of integrity, but I think their insularity prevents them from bringing in outside advice and entrusting power to true heavyweights.”

Geoffrey Kabaservice, the author of the recent book “Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party from Eisenhower to the Tea Party,” said it is too early to pronounce the end of Obama’s presidency — if only because the worst failures in the health care plan itself so far appear to be technical and bureaucratic, and may yet be repaired — despite the real and damaging furor over the president’s overblown promise that all who liked their current insurance plans could keep them. But he added, Obamacare’s early problems nevertheless reflect and amplify longstanding vulnerabilities for the Democrats, namely, “their love of complexity, the flavor of compulsion in their approach.”