Dear Nervous & Frustrated House Democrat...

Jonathan Cohn
TNR

Dear Nervous and Frustrated House Democrat,

It’s up to you.

A few days ago, after a year of debate, you were on the verge of achieving a goal that’s eluded progressives for nearly a century: Creating a national health insurance program. But now the whole effort could fall apart.

When Scott Brown takes his seat in the U.S. Senate, the Republicans will have 41 members in their caucus--enough to stop passage of any bill if they stay united. They’ve promised to do just that when and if they get to vote on the final version of health care reform--the one that recent House-Senate negotiations produced.

You’re depressed: Brown inherits the seat that once belonged to Ted Kennedy, who had made health care reform a lifelong crusade.

You’re angry, either for taking politically difficult votes or compromising your ideals in order to move the process along.

And, let’s face it, you’re scared. If a Democrat can lose in Massachusetts, any Democrat can lose anywhere. That includes you.

Now you have a choice.

The temptation will be to drop health care, change the subject, and hope for the best. After all, the voters clearly don’t like what they’re hearing and seeing out of Washington. And health care is all they’ve been hearing and seeing for the last few months. The polls suggest more people oppose the plan than support it. And the right wing is having a field day with it.

But is it the product the voters don’t like--or the process? Truth be told, most people don’t even understand the basics of what this bill would do. (Truth be told, neither do a few or your colleagues.) But in the one state that has implemented a similar set of reforms--Massachusetts, it so happens--voters support the idea by large margins. That’s why Brown went out of his way to endorse the Massachusetts system, even as he criticized its analogue on the national level.

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