P.M. Carpenter

It was a pithy lede -- "Now they have an enemy" -- meant by the Washington Post's Ceci Connolly to describe the morphing if not amorphous central front in the healthcare wars. But stay tuned, for it will morph again, and quite possibly into oblivion.

"They" are described by the Post as the Obama administration, which is actually too pithy, since "they" include Capitol Hill's Democratic leadership as well; and the "enemy," of course, is the health insurance lobby -- a rather ideal enemy, having earned a position of public trust somewhere in the neighborhood of bankers, lawyers, politicians and pundits.

"The insurance industry has decided to lead the charge against health reform, and everyone recognizes their motives: profits," said the White House deputy communications director in the wake of the former's scurrilous but not unpredictable sneak attack, which took the form of an independent "study" almost laughable in its dependent creativity.

This may be neither here nor there, and in fact it might be nothing but the idlest of thinking, but pondering this -- the early stages of jockeying for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination -- also possesses the appealingly restful attribute of having nothing to do with Max Baucus or merger committees or the beatitude of the number 60 or the apocalypse of 59. Consider it therapeutic.

My own therapeutic pondering was triggered yesterday by two background stories on the advice President Obama is receiving from two principal advisers -- his vice president and secretary of state -- on that one issue of the most durable consequences for this presidential term and the next: Afghanistan.

Both advisers are offering, I would hope, what they genuinely regard as the sounder advice. But one can't help wondering how much of the political beast of ineradicable ambition informs their views, which, on the matter of our national security vis-a-vis Afghanistan, represent a classic square-off between mainline dove-ism and moderate hawkishness.

Intentionally or not, yesterday the NY Times spotlighted the seemingly surreal politics of the Senate finance committee's public, as well as behind-the-scenes, machinations: "Ms. Snowe was a main author of the bill but she had never committed to voting for it."

I've got to give her credit. Unlike Chuck Grassley -- who perhaps bailed out a tad too early, although, on the other hand, Iowa's Republican primary politics are light-years removed from Maine's -- Snowe played this thing beautifully, and she now hangs like Damocles' sword over a merging Senate bill, and beyond.

These instances aren't nearly as rare as we'd all like them to be, but sometimes the childlike simplicity of the neoconservative mind prompts a grimacing double-take -- one of those 'Did he really say that?' moments, such as last Sunday morning, when Sen. John McCain sat as a guest on CNN's "State of the Union," presenting in living color the world in black-and-white analysis.

"The corruption has got to stop," said McCain at one point about Afghanistan's Karzai government and in partial answer to the unbounded question, "What is the United States doing wrong when it comes to the fundamental challenge of getting the Afghans ready to [protect] themselves?"

Corruption. Bad. Stop. Just stop. Seemingly as simple as that. Just say it -- and really mean it -- and maybe thousands of years of regional culture will slam on the brakes and then veer like Ottumwa, Iowa. Nay, not maybe; they will, but first we must really, really mean it.

In the introduction to his magnificent The Age of Betrayal: The Triumph of Money in America, 1865-1900, Jack Beatty notes a CBS News/New York Times poll, from 2004, in which 64 percent of the respondents answered in the affirmative to the first of these choices: "Would you say the government is pretty much run by a few big interests looking out for themselves or that it is run for the benefit of all the people?"

Not very surprising, you say? Hardly even noteworthy? By itself, that would be true; even from an anecdotal approach one can quickly -- and accurately -- surmise that most Americans have little faith in their government's virtuous independence.

But Beatty's purpose wasn't solely to point out that 21st-century America is off to a rocky start, confidencewise. His purpose was, rather, to note the remarkable acceleration of civic America's discontent: when the same question was asked in the 1960s, only about half of the later number were willing to agree that "the government is pretty much run by a few big interests."

Of all the right's sputtering and spitting and foaming and fulminating yesterday, my favorite came down to this rather meek entry in the Weekly Standard: "Obama could turn it down on the grounds that not all his peace plans have come to fruition yet, but why should he? And the Swedes could have waited a year on the same grounds, but why should they?"

To me, that subdued, petty putdown said so much more about the modern right and its Frankenstein mutation of neoconservatism than all of yesterday's more voluble manifestations combined. For there they were, the folks at "the Standard," the intellectual masters of the universe or at the very least this speck of a remote globe, but they had yet to learn that the "Norwegian Nobel Committee" is actually ... Norwegian.

Senate Democrats "rejoiced." That's how the NY Times described their reaction to an impersonal budget analysis performed by a faceless crew of soulless government accountants who had delivered that most compelling, most pivotal, most decisive news of all: that Max Baucus' Finance Committee's health-care bill "would reduce deficits."

Well thank heaven for that. For years the federal government under unified Republican control esteemed and executed fiscal responsibility as its very highest ideal, and we sure wouldn't want to interrupt their magnificent record of unyielding prudence.

So rejoice, ye Dems of easy amusement, who, after countless years of anguished debate and scores of sensible solutions, still can't get it right. Baucus' bill creeps stealthily toward a trillion dollars in public spending but nonetheless leaves 25 million inhabitants uninsured ten years from now, while permitting private costs to march ever upward.

Assuming the latest Associated Press-GfK poll is accurate -- granted, a debatable assumption, since it shows significant, twin upticks in President Obama's handling of health care and the economy, even though his management of these issues has undergone nearly unnoticeable change -- any robust U.S. military effort in Afghanistan is doomed here before, inevitably, it's doomed there.

While public support for Obama's handling of the conflict remains unchanged -- 46 percent pro, 41 percent con -- any future and more aggressive prosecution of the conflict, now in its ninth grinding year, appears increasingly unpopular. As is the conflict itself: in general, support for the war is down only slightly since July, yet there's no equivalent even division -- as there is for Obama's handling of it -- between the pro forces and con.

"Forty percent said they favored [the war]," reports the AP, while a whopping "57 percent said they were opposed." You'll notice the astounding absence of "no opinion." Virtually everyone seems to have one, and its collectivity is trending prodigiously negative.

I had hoped to be writing this morning of the Senate Finance Committee's final passage of its latest monstrosity -- few bills have ever begged for merger like this one -- but, as you know, that day of observance came and went with not atypical do-nothingness.

At the eleventh hour of the previous day, Chairman Max Baucus summoned the Delphic Congressional Budget Office, which, I'm sure, had in anticipation already summoned a fresh chicken, whose entrails the agency could read, and from such scientific workings then pronounce whether this vast Republic can afford to be well.

"It’s terrifying," said middle-aged Stephanie Wheeler, of New Jersey, who lost her job a year ago and has consumed nearly all her savings and now knows not how she'll manage to continue paying the rent -- thus, "I’m petrified of being set out on the street."

Multiply Stephanie's terror more than 15 million times -- twice that factor, if you choose to acknowledge the chronically underemployed as well as the hopelessly withdrawn -- and you get at least an arithmetical sense of, quite literally, a pandemic panic in the streets, in anonymous homes, and in tens of thousands of uncertain workplaces.

Now, it's true that Ms. Wheeler and her fellow idlers have merely failed to appreciate the (re)coming glory of supply-sided free enterprise and the transcendent magic of self-correcting markets. But what else should one expect of the little people, unschooled as they are in theoretical transcendence? The good lady from New Jersey could find solace in the principled knowledge that her unemployment and pending homelessness are but the nobly untaken Roads to Serfdom, but does she choose to embrace this, the finer things in life? Of course not.