How much do Republicans fear the Obama administration's coming health reform campaign today? How much did they fear it a week ago? To put it slightly differently: A lot of the Republican strategy will be predicated on whether they think, from the outset, that they can kill health reform and hand Obama a failure on the very issue that he said voters should use to "judge my first term as president." If they think they can, they will. And then they will invite voters to judge him. If they think they can't, then some Republicans might defect in order to avoid being on the wrong side of a popular accomplishment. Perceptions are important here, and my hunch is that perceptions in the GOP strategy meetings are very different today than a week ago.
