On health-care reform, a surprising assist from Republicans

"If we're able to stop Obama on this, it will be his Waterloo. It will break him."

Thus spoke, as the Washington Post reported, Republican Sen. Jim DeMint to a group of fellow pseudoconservatives on Friday. By "this" he meant health-care reform for 300 million Americans desperate for a humane and affordable system, currently broken beyond tinkering repair and scheduled for wholesale demolition; and by "we," of course, he meant the handful of loutish forces with their purely self-interested fingers in the aging dike of resistance.

Fair enough. Obstructionism is about all that's tactically left for the diminishing GOP, given its strategic failure to determinedly remake itself since either the initial political quake of 2006 or the even greater aftershock of late 2008, and medieval obscurantism remains their befuddling game.

What rankles, however, is that for months we've heard from Republican leaders that they've been rudely shut out of Beltway debates and negotiations; that those bullying Congressional Dems are an unreceptive lot, and that the White House, from official Day One, has been philosophically alienated from the political etiquette of warm and true bipartisanship.

But I ask you, Does DeMint's comment -- If we can stop him, it'll break him -- reflect any past or contemporary presence of an underlying willingness to work with the opposition?

It is my fervent hope -- I don't know why, but strong hopes are always "fervent" -- that Rahm Emanuel embossed the DeMint quote on White House stationery and priority-mailed it to every Blue Dog on Capitol Hill. Because as Obama goes, so goes, for more than a few of them, their tenuous seats -- and DeMint was merely making a not unreasonable, and broadly implicit, prediction.

The ungodly year of our Lord Two Thousand Aught Eight, as everyone knows and Republicans, in particular, keenly felt, was all about change. Real change. Fundamental change. And leading our pack of inclusive concerns was real health-care reform, complete with a public option -- some substantial government alternative to the policy-denying, policy-canceling, profit-pursuing buccaneers of private-insurance piracy, and at least some honest semblance of universality. (A seismic shift to single-payer is the most intelligent way to go, but, naturally, that last adjective and its attached modifier prohibit any such action on Capitol Hill.)

Based on the vast and exceedingly consistent polling I've seen, the above sentiment blanketed Blue Dog districts as compendiously as others. The American electorate, simply put, had had it with all of private insurance's exclusionary rules and exorbitant premiums and the systemic absence of any public alternative. In short, many of those newly elected Blue Dogs owe their seats, in large part, to Obama's passionate crusade for change, especially within our dilapidated health-care system.

Hence their political future is tied to Obama's success or failure. It's a continuum thing. And if they return to their districts in 2010 absent the change as promised by both Barack Obama and their own Democratic Party at large, there exists the easily imaginable potential for either smooth-talking Republican opponents or more progressive primary ones making mincemeat out of them. They're not yet the old bulls with seats as safe as John Dingell's.

These guys are vulnerable. They hail from swing districts that in 2008 swung for real change. Should they fail to follow up on the expectations of the inverted arc of that electoral pendulum, they -- all of us -- will pay for it.

Plus, the passage of comprehensive health-care reform is more than just the passage of comprehensive health-care reform. It is Obama's signature stance, that which will either launch or bury his first term. Success on health care is as symbolically crucial as it is tangibly necessary; failure might not doom the odds of a second Obama term, but it would, unmistakably, send it stumbling and reeling into Clintonlike perpetual ineffectiveness -- a publicly gutted presidency negotiating hereafter from a position of notable weakness.

And that, dear Blue Dogs, would only further reduce your own political potency. In general the Democratic Party would be under assault, not only from Republicans, but its decidedly erstwhile friends.

Congressional Democrats, as well as the White House, owe Jim DeMint an unexpected debt of gratitude. He has openly pointed the way -- two roads of potential success; one for Republicans, the other for Democrats. Now if the latter can only discern which is which.