There's a temptation to panic among my progressive blogging brethren - and to throw in the towel with histrionic gusto, like a Mets fan acknowledging one more bitter defeat. But thankfully, Nate Silver is there to put a little liquid courage in the goblets of those of us who believe the U.S. should adopt a public healthcare system worthy of the name "civilized nation" - and that the time to do so is now, early in the first term of a still-popular young President with a Democratic Congress.
The temptation whenever you happen to see Harry Reid on television talking about extending the clock on the most important legislation of the Obama Administration is to react the same way we generally do when witnessing Jerry Manuel writing Ollie Perez's name on the lineup card. That is to say, despair and defeatism bubble in the cauldron. But Silver thinks the darkness hasn't quite arrived on the edge of town:
By some point in August, the media will at least have tired of the present storyline and may in fact be looking for excuses to declare a shift in momentum and report that some relatively ordinary moment is in fact the "game changer" that the Democrats needed. This is not to say that the real, underlying momentum on health care has especially good -- and the Democrats' selling of the measure certianly hasn't been. But it hasn't been especially poor either . As I've said before, the health care process has played out just about how an intelligent observer might have expected it to beforehand.
Well, I still see the team team on the field, but miracles have been known to happen - so Nate's post was a welcome one tonight. Now I can get back to surfing the Donald Westlake canon down here at the shore: "solid protein reading matter," as James Wolcott rightly says.
