James fears that Barack Obama’s healthcare reforms may be in trouble if he can’t win enough Republican support to convince centrist voters. In other words, he’ll be too much beholden to the left-wing of the Democratic party. Well, perhaps. But centrist voters in 2009 are rather to the left of where they were in 1993, the last time major health care reform was tried. Also: Obama is a better salesman than early-90s Hillary Clinton. Remember too, Obama won with more than half the vote; Clinton was elected merely by a plurality of punters.
Now it may be that the GOP’s near-universal refusal to meet the new President half-way on the stimuls (though many more Republicans in Washington would, had it been a free and secret ballot have voted for the stimuls) will pay-off in the long run. But right now it is the Republican party, not the new President that is unpopular.
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