With so much on the line...

from Political Animal

by Steve Benen

In 1993, Bill Kristol privately advised congressional Republicans to do whatever it took to "kill" the Clinton health care reform initiative. It wasn't that the policy proposal was a bad idea; it was that passage would help the Democratic Party for years to come. The GOP, he said, for the sake of its own future, couldn't compromise or negotiate with the majority.

Sixteen years later, a wide variety of Democrats are working hard to convince Republicans to support reform, despite the built-in incentive for seeing reform fail. Mark Kleiman noted that a few too many Democrats seem to have forgotten the recent past, and worse, seem oblivious to the larger electoral dynamic.

For Gingrich and his allies, the health care debate wasn't really about health care: it was about destroying the power of a Democratic President.

It's not surprising that the Republicans have remembered that lesson, but it's disappointing that the "centrist" Democrats have forgotten it. This bill is make or break for the Democratic Party....

Matt Yglesias added:

In 1993, we had a new president elected on a promise of providing access to high-quality affordable health care to all Americans. In 1994, that promise went down in flames. The result of that failure was not only substantively bad, but politically disastrous for Democrats. Now it's 2009 and we have a new president elected on a promise of providing access to high-quality affordable health care for all Americans. It's pretty clear that Republicans remember that dealing a humiliating blow to said president by blocking reform will be politically useful to them.

And it's curious that many centrist Democrats -- particular those now eager to delay action on a bill and give special interests and the right more time to kill it -- don't seem to remember this.

(Continued here.)