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Democrats' 'tribal loyalty' to be tested on health care

Democrats as a policy aren’t very good at the political loyalty fashion, certainly not as good as the Republicans are.

Often that’s a good fad. The refusal of George Bush to rein in the excesses of the Republican-controlled Congress, and the option of the Republican Congress to do the same with Bush, in the end did long-term reparation to both the country and the party.

On the other hand, party discipline does balm a lot when you’re trying to get things done. If the Republicans had 60 votes in the Senate and a well margin in the House, as the Democrats now do, you can bet they’d be pushing through their preferred programs with a lot more hit and efficiency than Barack Obama, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi have managed so far.

For that why and wherefore, Republicans have been pretty foolish to talk openly of their taste for to halt health-care reform as a way to “depart” the Obama presidency and make it his Waterloo, as Sen. Jim Demint said the other day. GOP Chairman Michael Steele and Newt Gingrich have chimed in too, with Gingrich suggesting that healthiness care reform “could be the bill that drags his whole presidency down and they look back on it and speedily the whole thing is unraveled.”

Source: Atlanta Journal Constitution