Sixty

Reid got there, and it’s a staggering achievement.

Politically speaking, I think Jonathan Chait has the most interesting take on what happened. Over the summer, during the heyday of the tea parties, it looked like health care reform was doomed, or at least eviscerated. Obama’s insistence on a bipartisan bill gave Republicans free rein to negotiate in bad faith. And boy did they.

Would you look at how that turned out! As Chait writes, “The Republicans eschewed a halfway compromise and put all their chips on an all or nothing campaign to defeat health care and Obama’s presidency. It was an audacious gamble. They lost.” A gamble for which we should be forever grateful.

Of course it’s not a perfect bill. Did you expect it to be? If so, there’s a bridge I’d like to sell you. (It goes To Nowhere.) But the package we got is certainly better than nothing; it’s better than what we could have gotten if the GOP hadn’t been so brazen; and it lays the groundwork for incremental improvement. Here’s what’s in it now. Marc Ambinder—one of the smartest observers in Washington—even thinks that what the President will sign, after conference, will be more progressive than the Senate bill:

The bill that Obama signs will be “better” from the standpoint of liberal activists than the bill that the Senate is going to pass. It will contain more subsidies…probably some version of a trigger for some sort of insurance competitive mechanism…a reinstatement of mandatory cost controls for hospitals…and even tighter restrictions on insurers.

It is, after all, the most wonderful time of the year. Know hope.