The Quagmire of Obamacare

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.