Can we trade Obama for Nixon?
It’s difficult to know, in historical terms, how best to understand the monumental catastrophe of the Obamacare rollout. Is it yet another example of the pathological weakness and spinelessness of the Democratic Party, which never seems to get anything right and always prefers to negotiate itself into unnecessary compromise and ideological defeat? Or is it another symptom of our national refusal to pursue a rational and coherent healthcare policy, fueled partly by our bogus mythology of individualism and partly by the machinations of insurance-industry racketeers? Is there, to go one step further, a relationship between those two things?

I think the answers are clearly yes, yes and yes. ...

...But who’s wearing the clown nose now? Barely a month after the misbegotten shutdown, Obama has handed the Republican congressional majority all the political momentum they had thrown away and then some, a gift-wrapped invitation to win big in 2014 and continue the polemical paralysis of Washington into the indefinite future. As I and many other people have said already, Obama’s legacy is permanently contaminated by his immense expansion of the national-security state, by the global drone wars and the Panopticon-style electronic surveillance of everyone, everywhere, at all times. Now he’s on the verge of also becoming the president who had the chance to transform our overpriced, underperforming and profoundly unjust healthcare system in his grasp, and fumbled it at the last minute, Joe Pisarcik-style. (Younger readers: Google is your friend.)...