Former Bush Advisor Matthew Dowd compares Obama and the Democrats mishandling of the healthcare debate to George W.'s mishandling of the Iraq war.

Not quite, writes WSJ's James Taranto:

Republican politicians did not label opponents of the war effort "un-American," as Steny Pelosi and Nancy Hoyer have done to ObamaCare foes. Bush's White House, unlike Obama's, did not urge supporters to report "fishy" pro-Saddam arguments. Bush did not tell his critics to shut up and "get out of the way," as Obama did last week. The Bush administration simply made a compelling argument and won. The Obama administration, on the verge of losing after making a poor argument, now is lashing out at its critics--which seems a strategy to maximize the damage of this effort.

A closer analogy might be to President Bush's efforts in 2005 to reform Social Security. Having run on that promise in 2004, he misread his re-election mandate and spent much of his "political capital" pushing for a program that turned out to have little public support. He failed just as Obama is failing--although not nearly in so ugly a fashion.

Sounds about right.