The New Republic, under the leadership of Jonathan Cohn, has been the number one cheerleader for health care reform writ large.

His repeated exhortations for reform has had a similar effect to Paul Krugman of the NYT on the Democratic Party.

It is why this article from the New Republic is oh, so very, very important.

Stanley Greenberg was the pollster who lead the Democratic Party down the lose-56-seats-in-the-U.S.-House path of the spectacular failure of Hillary-care. OK, that is probably an overstatement, but, his polls had a whole lot to do with the Democratic Party pushing all their chips onto the table on Health Care Reform last time around.

Greenberg dusted off his memos to President Clinton and the poll questions he asked back then, and asked them again, now.

In an OH NO MR. BILL moment, the worst case scenario to the polling questions happened again, as Greenberg writes:

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Jonathan Chait is all upset at the Democratic Party. Hs is damning their eyes for not blindly accepting every extremist, left-wing idea that President Obama would like to implement. Chait is wailing that Congressional Democrats are standing athwart Obama’s radical agenda just when he assumes we are at a “once-in-a-generation chance for the Democratic Party to reshape” the country.

Chait is right, of course, that Congressional Democrats are not bending over blindly for Obama’s agenda and many elected officials are jealously guarding their privilege is true enough. He is also right that Obama has faced some obstacles within his own party — and it is probably coming as a surprise to the president, too. But he is wrong to assume they are doing it for spite, mere power or necessarily for personal aggrandizement. In fact, Chait has a major misunderstanding of the very country that Democrats represent. You see, Chait thinks that just because Obama won a 7 percent majority of the vote the whole country is ready to become a radicalized, socialist, anti-religious, and virulently anti-capitalist nation. Chait makes the major mistake in thinking “the people” of the United States of America are just like him.

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