Paul Waldman on why 2009 isn’t 1993 in the battle for health-care reform:
Talk to progressives on the subject of health care, and you will find they’ve gotten more and more nervous in the last couple of weeks. They are acutely aware that momentum for health-care reform seems to gain sufficient speed to make real change a possibility only every 15 or 20 years. Screw it up now, and it’ll be a long time before there’s another chance at it.
It isn’t only those on the Hill who are issuing dark warnings. Stan Greenberg, who was President Bill Clinton’s pollster during the last health-care reform effort, recently penned a gloomy article in The New Republic, making the case that from the standpoint of public opinion, 2009 is starting to look like 1993 all over again.
Should we be nervous? Of course — lives are at stake, after all. But should we panic? Absolutely not.
