The Democratic Party, blowing a once-unbeatable lead

As our little shop of health-care horrors continues spinning its complex web of uncovered gaps, omissions, pitfalls, holes and exceptions even for the insured -- this morning, for instance, the NY Times' lead story, "Many With Insurance Still Bankrupted," notes that "three-quarters of people who are pushed into personal bankruptcy by medical problems actually had insurance," which a former Cigna executive labeled, before a Senate health committee last week, as "fake insurance," marketed to "confuse[d] customers" -- we now face, owing to a grotesquely unresponsive Democratic Congress, the profound paradox of a right-wing backlash.

A vast electorate, running through the left, center-left, center and even center-right slots of the political spectrum, has already had a bellyful of Democratic paralysis on real, comprehensive health-care reform -- Capitol Hill's factional bickering appears unrestrained by earthly time or boundaries -- yet voters' exasperation seems not to grab Democrats' attention. As they sit in committee or cloakroom, splicing unintelligible deals like subprime securities, embracing counterproductive bipartisanship, accepting bribes, and in general watering down wholesale reform to an unsavory gruel, they seem oblivious to 2008's democratic mandate: On health care, go socialist.

All this, despite former Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean's acute, astute warning, which I quoted in yesterday's column: "I think it's going to be a catastrophic problem for the Democratic Party if they can't get this [public option] bill out."

When confronted, on "Meet the Press," with that unambiguous premonition of annihilation, White House senior adviser David Axelrod tried mitigating its unambiguity: "Well ... I think that if we don't pass healthcare reform it's going to be a catastrophic problem for the country, not just the Democratic Party; for families, businesses and the country itself."

True enough. But that, as Axelrod privately understands, was not Dean's point; instead -- and this scarcely requires clarification -- the latter was clanging the alarm of an anti-Democratic backlash, born of voter disgust from a singular cause.

Yet it's rather easy to imagine how that disgust could harden as but the icy core of a larger, snowballing discontent.

A week ago, the Politico took an analytical look at the GOP's prospects for 2010, noting in its lede that "top Republicans see signs -- however faint -- of a political resurgence over the next year," further noting that that's not as "absurd" as it sounds. Doubtless, the party owns some huge problems, ranging from its straying tomcats to its leaderless existence to its anachronistic obsession with "values" to its aging, whitened demographics, but there are some evolving upsides, too.

First, as even the usually opaque mind of House Minority Whip Eric Cantor has fathomed, there's Democrats' "vulnerability" on rising unemployment: It's "going to exceed 10 percent and be there for some time," said Cantor, correctly, adding that "the stimulus bill ... hasn't done" its promised job.

Well, Democrats can't say they weren't warned about that -- their stimulus bill's fiscal inadequacy on the spending side, plus their self-destructive catering to mostly useless, inarguably counter-clever Republican demands on the tax-cutting side.

There's also bailout-fatigue -- "Nearly $20 billion ... for Chrysler, $49.5 billion for General Motors, $13.5 billion for GMAC Financial Services, $46 billion for Citigroup and a whopping $167.5 billion for American International Group" -- although much of public unhappiness over bailouts, at least in my opinion, has resulted less from staggering dollar amounts than from Democrats' enduring inability to impressively peddle a message. By now, the slick machinery of the old Republican majority would have had Americans believing that they had saved money on, for instance, AIG, not spent it, or at the very least, that deficits don't matter.

What's more, there's the money thing. Said a Democratic strategist, "It's fear in fundraising that raises money," and, the Politico added, "without a bogeyman in the White House, Democrats are seeing the flip side of that dynamic" at increasingly "difficult" fundraising events for House and Senate candidates.

The deadly cincher, however -- what will congeal all this bubbling, peripheral discontent and difficulty into a tumultuous squall of electoral apathy -- will come in what the Politico confoundingly ignored: voters' unparalleled disgust with Congressional Democrats' special-interest captivity on the battlegrounds of comprehensive health-care reform.

For a reasonable while, voters will deal with deficits and the like, but if Democrats betray them on health care -- betray them on what they unequivocally demanded in 2008 -- they'll deal the party a devastating blow in return, by just staying home in 2010.

The result: not so much a right-wing resurgence as a squeaking by, by default.

With the possible exception of George W. Bush, only the Democratic Party could so abruptly squander so much goodwill.