The Nation's "Notion" blog on health care reform and the inevitability of Democratic impotence:
You see, lefties? You can't hold your leaders accountable, because it's the nameless, faceless "system" that's to blame. Which is pretty much the same street-corner logic that leads millions of people to opt out of democracy altogether. Either the presidency matters or it doesn't. Either our leaders are accountable for the policies they create or they are not. And if they are not, let's drop the conceit of democracy and take the reform debate from there....
There have been many irrational, uncooperative participants in the health care debate: The industries that have profited immensely from the broken status quo, the just-say-no Republicans and the handful of conservative Democrats who have enlarged themselves by standing in the way of real reform, to name a few. The left, on the other hand, has embraced compromise after compromise -- and the result is we've all squandered a rare political opportunity to make sweeping changes rather than tinker at the margins. Forgive me if I can't fix my mouth to call that historic. But I'm just an idiotic left-wing blogger, so what do I know.
