Wall Street Journal: The Obama Health Care Express

From The Wall Steet Journal: A charismatic Democratic President takes office promising to extend health insurance to all Americans. His party enjoys majorities in Congress, and the GOP is at sea. The press corps finds policy a bore and instead files stories that draw facile analogies to the heyday of FDR.
 
Yes, all that will be true next year -- but it was also true in January 1993. Fewer than two years later, the grand health care ambitions of Bill and Hillary Clinton were reduced to tatters. No one is more attuned to this memory than today's Democrats, who aren't about to let history repeat itself. And since the lessons they learned from the HillaryCare fiasco are political, and not substantive, they are already moving full-speed ahead.

This mentality is nicely captured by Tom Daschle, the former Senate Majority Leader who Barack Obama has tapped to run Health and Human Services. "I think that ideological differences and disputes over policy weren't really to blame," he writes of 1994 in his book "Critical," published earlier this year. Despite "a general agreement on basic reform principles," the Clintons botched the political timing by focusing on the budget, trade and other priorities before HillaryCare.

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