Alain Sanders in the Star-Ledger:
First came the Pelosi [health care] Plan, an amalgam of the Miller Plan, the Rangel Plan and the Waxman Plan. And that was just in the House.
Then in the Senate came the Reid Plan, an agglomeration of the Dodd Plan, Harkin Plan and Baucus Plan, as amended by the Landrieu Plan, Lieberman Plan, Nelson Plan and a proliferation of others.
Now Democrats in Congress are scrambling to put together a Final Compromise Plan that can get enough votes to pass both houses.
Nowhere along the way did we see anything discernable as the Obama Plan....
This arbitrative approach will have set an unfortunate precedent. The expectation of a dispassionate Obama presidency will send an all-clear signal to the members of Congress. It will embolden the Democratic barons, embitter the party’s rank-and-file and energize the Republican opposition. It will do nothing to bring the nation’s politics closer to Obama’s grand vision of bipartisanship. It will, in fact, encourage quite the opposite: divisive political entrepreneurship.
