The Baroness Ashton is a very unhappy woman. You can see it on her face, poor lady.

And even the fact that she is now a “peer”--or should one still say “peeress”?--has not visibly altered her look. She is one of those ugly ducklings who has given her life to social causes, a type we all know. Alas, the outcome of such an existence is very rarely happiness. Take her work as treasurer of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), seen as a front by the Soviets, who secretly supplied as much as 38% of its budget. What satisfaction could it possibly have given her, what with the collapse of Communist Russia and each and every one of its brutal satraps?

So she no longer leads the cheering at pathetic Trafalgar Square protests. In fact, she is now a certified VIP, the “European Union High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy”--the more cumbersome the title, the less substantial the job. But she does travel in limos. And perhaps in private jets, too. After all, she is the EUHRFFAASP. Quite a mouthful.

As it happens, there is great discontent among the Europeans about her incumbency. Some of this is related to dismay with the Union itself. But she has had absolutely no experience of any sort in foreign affairs. As late as nine years ago, in fact, she was the chairlady of the Hertfordshire Health Authority and of the board of her children’s school. Very, very wholesome. Still, if Sarah Palin was unsuited for the American vice presidency, as she certainly was, Lady Ashton is at least as unsuited for the job of Europe’s ersatz foreign minister. On the other hand, she comes equipped with a big bag of demands, virtually all of them addressed to Israel: “do this” and “don’t do that.” She doesn’t ask questions, she instructs (as the Quaker dowager on my civil rights “Boycott Woolworth” picket line instructed). These liberal minded folk turn out to be quite doctrinaire. And earnest. With the sweetness of clenched teeth.

Now, in Moscow last week, the Quartet--made up of the United Nations, Russia, the United States, and the European Union--condemned Israel on account of the East Jerusalem housing crisis, which had been hyped up with grotesque cynicism by the Obama administration. And, with even more grotesque cynicism, the four horsemen (two of them actually women) of the apocalypse also condemned Israel for not allowing certain building materials into the Gaza Strip. Again, their faces said it all: They looked as if they were ushering in the Day of Judgment.

As it happens, not. Within hours of their smug condemnations of the Jewish state, five rockets hailing from Gaza had landed in the Negev. One hit a communal agricultural facility and killed a Thai worker. There is nothing like demanding of a beleaguered people that it supply its enemies with materiel facilitating their continuous offense against it.

There is something faintly comic about the Quartet purporting to broker a peace agreement between Israel and the haplessly divided and hopelessly violent Palestinians. After all, the members of the Quartet don’t agree on anything among themselves but the supposed calumnies of Israel. Moreover, the two collective bodies in the foursome are phantoms--one more than the other, I suppose. So take your pick. I’ll take mine.

The truth is that what keeps the U.N. alive is the General Assembly, which affords governments (imaginary and real) the opportunity to send thousands of pompous officials to New York every fall to dine and wine (and to whine on behalf of the wretched of the earth.) I will not repeat my previous anti-U.N. wraps. (You can read some of my thoughts here and here.) But think of me when the Security Council finally debates sanctions against Iran.

Still, the real comedy belongs to the European Union. Yes, there is an enormous bureaucracy that has saved Brussels, which otherwise has only a bronze boy pissing in the street ... and, of course, some lace dealers--finicky, finicky, finicky. (In Antwerp, there are also many Muslims who contribute mightily to the national well-being--not finicky at all.)

The bureaucracy aspires to replace the democratic ethos of the Union’s member states. Some of these aspirations have already been achieved without many people actually voting in E.U. elections because the Union and the nations themselves are so removed from each other. But, now that at least four member states are on their way to bankruptcy, the E.U. has lost is capacity to do what it was supposed to do best. The eurocurrency was a fiction imposed on governments at such different levels of economic development and such different levels of industrial discipline that it was bound to collapse. The fact is that Germany does not want to support Greece--the most desiccated, most deluded, and most corrupt of European societies--in its illusions. (Greeks retire at age 50 with full pensions.) Neither are Germany and the other productive economies of Europe willing to bolster poor Portugal or pathetic Ireland, for that matter. Let them go their own way. And let the different nations of the continent be what they are and want to be.

But, before Portugal and Ireland go on the dole or to the poorhouse, there is also Spain. Real estate has simply collapsed. There is nowhere in the world (save the “fabulous” emirates) where land and houses are so cheap and still go unbought. There is 20% unemployment (if you don’t count the Arabs, illegal and legal, who would raise the number to God only knows what and still sup off a generous social security system that is in the process of falling apart).

Spain is governed, insofar as it is governed at all, by a socialist regime. One of its obsessions happens also to be Israel, perhaps in deference to its many Muslim constituents. Perhaps in deference, as well, to its historic tick about Jews and pure Catholic blood. It’s ironic that Madrid whines for Palestine and does not grasp the urge and surge for Catalonia, to say nothing about the Basque land.

The European Union is on its last legs. It may survive as ghosts survive in books or in film. It may even survive in the Quartet, whatever survival power that has. But it has no power and no moral authority. So perhaps I understand the baroness’ portentousness. It is made of nothing. But it’s not just her, although members of the Labor Party have begun hammering her as “too dull and too dim.”

My Saturday began on the West lawn of Capitol Hill, where conservative activists were mounting one final, desperate effort to block health care reform. They came by the thousands, carrying flags and pushing strollers, in a demonstration of genuine grassroots fervor. They chanted “Kill the Bill,” over and over again, in a vaguely menacing tone that, perhaps, foretold a bit of ugliness to come.

But the most remarkable thing about the demonstration was how little it had to do with health care. The signs said “Stop socialism,” “A government of laws, not men,” “Respect our constitution--preserve our republic.” Nobody talked about death panels. Instead, one speaker--a Chicago radio host, I believe--attacked the First Lady’s obesity initiative. “Michelle, keep your hands off my kids’ lunchbox!” Yet another protest sign seemed to capture the mood perfectly: “This isn’t about health care. This is about control.”

A few hours later, inside the Capitol complex, President Obama urged House Democrats to do precisely what the protesters feared: Pass health care reform. It was not the first time he’d given such a speech. Just before the House voted on its initial reform bill in November, he’d come to Capitol Hill. And, broadly speaking, his intent had been the same: To embolden the Democrats by making them enthusiastic about the cause, demonstrating his own commitment to it, and making clear the political virtues of success.

But, like the protesters, this time Obama seemed to dwell less on health care and more on the significance of the moment. He invoked Lincoln, and the importance of fighting for principle. And then he invoked the legacy of the New Deal and Great Society, reminding members that their purpose in office was not to win elections--it was to make life better for their constituents. His closing argument was not about policy or politics. It was about posterity. And it was good.

For the last week or so, ever since it’s become apparent a climactic vote on health care was approaching, I’ve also been thinking about closing arguments. For most of the past year--and, really, it’s been far more than a year--the argument has been most practical. What would the bill do? What wouldn’t it do? And it’s easy enough to make the case for reform on those grounds.

As readers of this space know, I like to think of reform as achieving three broad goals: Making sure anybody can get an affordable insurance policy, shoring up everybody’s coverage so that it provides real economic security, and transforming medical care in order to make it both more effective and less expensive. Those arguments got a lot stronger this week, when the Congressional Budget Office determined that the final reform package--including both the Senate’s health care bill and the proposed amendments to it--would provide coverage to 32 million additional people, strengthen the baseline for coverage, and reduce the federal deficit over time.

But there’s another argument for health care reform, one that is at once more subtle and more sweeping. The disturbing part of our health care system is the financial and physical suffering it causes. But the unjust part of our health care system is the way it distributes that suffering. There are things all of us can do to stay healthy--we can eat right, we can exercise, we can avoid excessive risks. But even when we do the right things, we remain vulnerable.

You can have the perfect diet, jog three miles every day, and wake up one morning to discover you have cancer. So now you face mortal peril. And if, on top of everything else, you can’t pay your medical bills, you face financial ruin, as well.

Chance, of course, is part of life. Americans, in particular, seem to accept that. But every now and then, we have decided that need for such expansion--that there was, even now, the kind of common vulnerability to chance that required the sorts of initiatives we had enacted in the past. It happened with the New Deal, when we created the modern welfare state, and then again with the Great Society, when we expanded it.

The signature programs of these eras, Social Security and Medicare, work because they address a vulnerability we all share. Everybody is at risk of getting old; and everybody is at risk of misfortune, physical and financial, when that happens. To protect against that misfortune--to insure against that misfortune--all of us contribute. We all give, in the form of financial contributions; and we all get, in the form of financial security. Together, quite literally, we are stronger than when we are apart.

The conservatives protesting on the Capitol lawn Saturday see things differently. Health care reform isn't about contributing money for the sake of their own security; it's about having their money taken for the sake of somebody else's security. When they hear stories of people left bankrupt or sick because of uninsurance, they are more likely to see a lack of personal responsibility and virtue than a lack of good fortune. As my colleague Jonathan Chait has observed, theirs is an extreme version of a view common (although surely not universal) on the right: That individuals can fend for themselves, as long as they are responsible and as long as the government gets out of the way.

There's obviously a balance to be struck between these two world views. But, broadly speaking, conservative ideas about responsibility and vulnerability have dominated political discussion for most of the last four decades. That will change on Sunday, if health care reform passes. The bill before Congress may be flawed. And the process that produced it may be severely flawed. But it is, nevertheless, an expression of the idea that we--as as society--are not prepared to let people continue to suffer such dire consequences just because they’re unlucky.

A few hours after Obama was speaking, the Capitol had nearly cleared out. Leadership staff were meeting in House Speaker Pelosi's office while a few stray congressmen were giving floor speeches to a nearly empty chamber. By and large, though, members had scattered--a tell-tale sign that Pelosi was confident. If she'd still needed to do serious arm-twisting, she'd have held a series of votes to keep members on the Hill.

I walked the length of the building and then out to the east lawn where the conservative protesters, who spent the day visiting (and, on a few occasions, haranguing) House Democrats, had reconvened. The crowd was more subdued now. It was smaller, too--hundreds instead of thousands. The setting sun behind the capitol dome cast a long shadow over them, as night approached. But a new dawn would come soon enough. And with it, perhaps, a new era.

I noted in a previous post that wavering House members represent districts that have the most to gain from health reform. Thanks to my colleague Louis Woynarowski, we can see this in mapped form. He mapped uninsurance rates for every district represented by a wavering House member, as listed in FiredogLake's invaluable whip count. Each district is shaded to represent the percentage of nonelderly people who lack health coverage. The data comes from the Census Bureau's 2008 American Community Survey, as reported by Genevieve Kinney and colleagues. Darker colors indicate higher numbers of uninsured. Members' votes on the original House bill are indicated by a "Y" or an "N" superimposed over their districts.

(Click here to see a higher-resolution version of the map.)

Things look a little clunky, but two critical patterns are clear.

First, uninsurance is generally much higher in these districts than in the nation as a whole. Average uninsurance rates across all 435 districts is 17.0 percent. Most wavering members represent districts with markedly higher rates of non-coverage.

Second, there are pronounced regional differences.

Wavering northeastern members tend to represent districts with relatively mild uninsurance rates. Scott Brown’s implicit question: “What’s in it for us?” may most telling for these members.

Those from the Southwest and southern Texas represent districts with very high uninsurance rates, though many of these districts include large numbers of unauthorized immigrants who would not benefit from the current bill. In some ways, I am most sympathetic to these legislators, whose constituents have a legitimate beef in the absence of immigration reform.

Most remaining wavering members represent a broad swath of Appalachia and the deep South. This last, large group--roughly spanning Oklahoma, Arkansas, Mississippi, Georgia, North Carolina--represent districts with very high rates of noncoverage, in some cases more than 1/3 of the entire population. This is the bloc of representatives most hostile to health reform, and the group that stands the most to gain if this bill actually passes despite their own “No” vote.

Consider Dan Boren’s district in Oklahoma. According to calculations performed by the Energy and Commerce Committee , health care reform would extend insurance coverage to more than 135,000 constituents. It would provide tax credits to tens of thousands more, while guaranteeing that more than 21,000 people with preexisting conditions can obtain coverage. Boren opposes the bill.

Then there is Arkansas’s Marion Berry. The same calculations indicate that health care reform would extend insurance coverage to 83,500 of his constituents, and that 15,000 people with preexisting conditions would be guaranteed coverage. Health care reform would extend insurance coverage to 78,000 of Heath Shuler’s North Carolina constituents, too, while guaranteeing coverage to 14,500 people with preexisting conditions. Berry and Shuler oppose the bill. Then there are Mike Ross, Travis Childers, and many others.

Perhaps most inexcusable is another likely “NO” vote. Artur Davis. His Alabama district is one of the nation’s safest and poorest. Health care reform would extend insurance coverage to an estimated 61,500 of his constituents. It would provide especially large tax credits and other benefits to literally hundreds of thousands of people. Davis wants to be governor, and apparently believes that a “No” vote on health reform will help this effort. It won’t.

The list goes on, but the point is clear. Passing this bill will help millions of Americans, despite the best efforts of their own elected representatives. Thank goodness, the President and Speaker Pelosi have apparently found the votes they needed. Still, it’s the tough votes that test the content of politicians’ character. By the looks of that map, more than a few men and women in the United States Congress will fail that test tomorrow.

President Obama is about to address House Democrats in the auditorium of the Capitol visitors' center. Standing in front of the entrance, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer just made a few key announcements:

- He confirmed that the House would vote on the Senate bill and the reconciliation amendment separately.

- There will be two hours of debate on the reconciliation bill. A vote on the Senate bill will follow immediately after that.

- The Senate bill will go directly to the president for a signature, while the amendments go to the Senate.

- Perhaps most important, House leaders have seen a letter, signed by more than 50 Senate Democrats, saying they will vote for the reconciliation amendment.

per the Washington Post. They'll do a straight vote on the Senate bill and then reconcile, which is what I've wanted.

National Review's Daniel Foster complains, "We've been baited. And here's the switch." I don't think that was really the plan. But if it was, it worked! Republicans spent a week whipping themselves into a lather over a procedural maneuver they've used many, many times. It wasn't their real objection but they made it seem like the end of the world. "Demon pass," they've been calling it. And now they've wasted several days worth of ginned-up outrage.

Jonathan Bernstein dismisses my fears that the Supreme Court might overturn health care reform:

Accepting for the sake of argument that Bush v. Gore was arbitrary, I would say that if so it basically stands alone; I'm not aware of any other case in which the Court dropped in, made a decision for apparently pure political reasons, and then told everyone to ignore the logic and decision of the case as a precedent.  Could they do that again with health care reform?  Sure -- but if that, why not any other program that they disagree with?  In which case we all have much bigger problems than the fate of health care reform.

On the other hand, what if they simply find against health care reform by changing precedent.  The article referred to above is about "deem and pass," but there are also going to be legal challenges, or at least rumblings about challenges, on a whole host of substantive measures (such as the individual mandate).  If the Court goes after health care by changing doctrine, either over Congressional procedure or substance, once again there are bigger problems than health care reform.  In the one case, any bill passed with a self-executing rule would be in trouble, and there are lots of those; in the other, well, it would depend on what the court does, but it would be difficult to knock out health care reform without endangering plenty of other laws, many of which are very popular.  That doesn't mean the Court won't do it, but only that the real problem in that case is the Court, not health care reform.

Well, first of all, I made a reference to "high-stakes Republican priorities." Let me explain what I meant by that. The Supreme Court needs legitimacy. If they went around handing down Bush v. Gore decisions every year, they'd have a crisis. They do not have limitless power. They need to husband their legitimacy and spend it on those occasions when the stakes are very high -- like, say, the Florida recount. Certainly health care reform is a dramatically higher stakes fight than any other domestic policy battle during the tenure of this court.

Second, the Court obviously needs somebody to bring it a case. Bernstein makes a joke about invalidating the 2000 election on grounds that President Obama was born in Kenya, and of course they'd never do that. They'd need a case that has some patina of legitimacy -- that is, the support of some non-nutty member of the right-wing legal establishment. They have that. They also need somebody to bring them a case. They're probably going to have that.

So at that point, the question becomes, does the Supreme Court majority make an aggressively activist ruling to hand Republicans victory on the biggest policy fight of the last forty years? Probably not, but I wouldn't be too surprised if they did. Bernstein notes that doing so would invalidate scores of other laws. And yes, he concedes, this court has previously made a one-time only ruling whose precedent would not apply to anything else, in order to get its desired result, but they've only done it one time.

Is that supposed to be reassuring? Would Bernstein advise a family member to marry John Edwards? After all, he only had that one affair.

Dej ja vu all over again: We're a day away from a House vote on health care reform and success, once again, may hinge on a deal with Democrats who oppose abortion rights.

As you know, Michigan Rep. Bart Stupak has said he can't vote for the senate health care bill because, at least in his view, it doesn't sufficiently restrict abortion. He's said that as many as a dozen Democrats will vote with him--potentially enough to prevent House leadership from rounding up a 216-vote majority.

Last night, there was talk leadership might accommodate Stupak by adding abortion language to the bill or holding a separate vote--infuriating democrats who support abortion rights. But, as reported by TPM's Brian Beutler, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi just said there will be no separate vote. Henry Waxman, chairman of Energy and Commerce and a Pelosi confidante, later told a handful of reporters that "what (Stupak and his supporters) want they cannot get, because the rules do not allow it."

That doesn't mean there will be no deal. At around noon, a senior House aide told me another option remained under discussion: having President Obama issue an executive order applying the Hyde amendment, which forbids federal funding of abortion, to the new insurance exchanges.

It's not clear whether that would satisfy Stupak--or whether it's even necessary to satisfy him. Its possible leadership can get the votes without him.

Update: via Huffington Post's Sam Stein, Rep Jan Schakowsky says as many as 50 Democrats would bolt if Stupak gets his language in the bill. Outside of a Democratic whip meeting, Rep. Diana DeGette also expressed frustration with the situation in an interview with me, saying "we feel like we've compromised enough already." But DeGette didn't rule out the possibility of an executive order. "If it simply states that there will be no federal funding of abortion in the bill, that's fine, because we've already agreed to that."

Okay, I've finally found somebody more optimistic than me. After weeks of being more optimistic, Nate Silver has shot past me:

You'd have to give me 10-1 to bet against health care now. Even if something goes wrong, Ds may have an out by cutting deal w/Stupak.

Ten to one? I agree that the outlook appear solid and the democrats appear to have some options -- deal with Stupak, go around Stupak, maybe do something on abortion that can satisfy most of his bloc. But each of those approaches also carries some risk of going wrong. Indeed, I tale seriously the risk of abortion blowing up the bill, because there are people in the Democratic caucus who care way, way more about abortion than health care, and would rather abandon reform than permit a slight increase or reduction in the convenience of abortion for some women. David Dayen reports on some wrangling here.

I believe this will probably (around 75%) get resolved. But I see the chance of some kind of blowup as very real.

Via Ron Brownstein:

Yale University political scientist Stephen Skowronek, a shrewd student of the presidency, sees in this complex record evidence that Obama and his team are torn between consensual and confrontational leadership styles. The first, he says, stresses "the progressive reform idea of bringing everybody to the table [for] rational, pragmatic decision-making." The second argues "that you transform politics only through wrenching confrontation." Skowronek believes that the most-consequential presidents, such as Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, usually start with the first approach and evolve toward the second as they encounter entrenched resistance.

What a way to run a government:

For more than a year, the Treasury Department has grappled with a monumental global economic crisis while many of its most senior people have had to walk out of internal meetings at critical moments and have been barred from joining in-depth exchanges with foreign governments.

That's because the appointments of these officials have been blocked at times by various Republican senators. Until now, their reasons for thwarting the Treasury have been largely unknown beyond the halls of Congress.

It turns out the sources of discontent apparently were not the appointments themselves. In one case, it was a tax penalty on small businesses. In another, the passage of an anti-tobacco plan in Canada. Yet another involved a tussle over online gambling....

Some Senate GOP aides said Bunning wanted to see the Obama administration more vigorously oppose a plan by the Canadian government to ban fruit-flavored cigarettes. The Canadian initiative, which was intended to curb youth smoking, could hurt Kentucky tobacco farmers.

The rules of the Senate allow Senators to basically stop any presidential appointment at will for any reason at all. I'd love to change this arrangement, but apparently it's exactly how the Founding Fathers designed the system to work so we can't change it.

In many ways, the health care debate is a repeat over Bill Clinton's 1993 budget. The administration hailed it as a worthwhile step in restoring progressivity to the tax code and reducing the budget deficit. The opposition featured the same basic combination of apoplexy on the right and cynicism in the center.

Start with the right-wingers. Lawrence Kudlow wrote a couple weeks ago:

More spending. More tax hikes on investors, businesses, and individuals. New government boards to control prices, ration care, and redistribute income. ...

if Obamacare does pass, a future rollback will be very difficult, and American health care and economic prosperity will be put in grave jeopardy.

In 1993, Kudlow wrote:

There’s no question that President Clinton’s across-the-board tax increases on labor, capital and energy will throw a wet blanket over the recovery and depress the economy’s long run potential to grow.

Kudlow was expressing the dominant mood on the right. The Wall Street Journal published a series of editorials under the heading "The Class Warfare Economy," featuring a picture of a guillotine. When Clinton's plan passed the House of Representatives, the Journal published an editorial headlines "The Fate Of The World."

On the right, it was universally assumed that Clinton's spending cuts were phony, his tax hikes on the rich would reduce revenues, and the claim of deficit reduction would fail to materialize. The political center and among the mainstream media did not adapt the apocalyptic tone of the conservative, of course. Instead the prevailing attitude was cynicism that the budget numbers would really add up. You had reports like this, from CNN:

For all Bill Clinton's talk about no gimmicks, he quickly adapted to this smoke-and-mirrors world. His February budget proposal -- billed as a $500 billion deficit reduction package -- took credit for $45 billion in savings already ordered by previous legislation. Clinton's plan also included enough funny math and dubious assumptions that the real bottom line, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) -- the designated scorekeeper in matters fiscal -- would have been deficit reduction of just $355 billion over five years. Remarkably, the House so far has rejected much of Clinton's proposed new spending, trimming many programs and derailing a few of his other favorites, such as research on magnetic levitation trains. The Senate has made similar cuts. As a result, both houses have produced budgets more likely to come closer to that $500 billion target. Even so, the goal of deficit reduction keeps moving away like Tantalus's grapes.

The New York Times was running headlines like "Critics See Some Smoke and Mirrors in Clinton's Economic Plan." ("Questions have already been raised over the exact size of the deficit reductions Clinton's plan will produce.") Another Times article suggested:

The budget documents published today show that while the deficit would be cut by $39 billion next year and $54 billion in 1995, Government spending, now more than $1 trillion a year, would be reduced by only $5 billion next year and $6 billion in 1995. All the rest of the deficit reduction in those years would be accomplished by tax increases. Only in the last two years of Mr. Clinton's term would spending cuts begin to bite.

The specifics of the accusations were strikingly similar. The deficit targets were too modest. The Democrats were postponing the real pain. They were employing tricks and rosy scenarios. In retrospect, Clinton's deficit reduction has won over all but its most partisan critics. Obviously, the economic boom disproved the supply-side claims that the upper-bracket tax hikes would dampen economic growth. And over the next five years, federal outlays decreased by more than 2 percent of GDP, defying predictions that spending restraint would be illusory. While it's impossible to prove how much of the improvement was driven by economic growth, budget experts credit the measure with important contributions to the decline of the deficit during the 1990s. Allen Schick, in his book "The Federal Budget: Politics, Policy, Process," concludes:

Liquidating the deficit ranks as one of the supreme budgetary accomplishments in American history...

economic good times alone do not account for the budget's unexpected turnaround....

Although the surplus would not have emerged in the 1990's without a cooperative economy, it also would not have occurred if budget makers had repeated the policy mistakes of the 1980's.

With health care reform, the charges are repeated over and over again. The answer, in sum, is that the accusations of phony savings are almost entirely bunk. Once stripped of transparently fake accusations, such as claiming health care reform is hiding the cost of physician reimbursements that would happen even if there was no health care reform, the even debatable quibbles with the Congressional Budget office score are minimal. Moreover, the conservatives have totally ignored the long-term cost saving potential of the multiple delivery-system reforms that will attempt to force medical providers to adopt efficient practices. CBO has declined to credit these reforms with saving money because they're new approaches, and CBO takes a very cautious approach toward scoring reforms that lack a proven record of success. But to assume that all will completely fail is wildly pessimistic. In short, the right-wing critics have taken a "heads I win, tails you lose" approach to the CBO score. They pick apart the things that CBO scores as reducing the deficit, and take for granted the accuracy of CBO's extreme caution toward delivery system reforms.

Like in 1993, the sheer single-mindedness of the conservative echo chamber has dragged the center of the debate rightward. In the face of monotonous complaints about phony numbers, moderates have been defensive about the cost-saving potential of Obamacare. The CBO numbers may not be entirely correct but they're reasonable, we say. They should have done more, but at least they've done something. Hey, maybe the delivery reforms might help some.

I believe that, over time, considered opinion will view the fiscal responsibility of Obamacare quite favorably. The hysteria of the right and the disappointment of the liberals and moderates will fade, and what's left will be a bill that not only establishes a right to medical care but, over time, begins to arrest the unsustainable rate of medical inflation. By the standards of what out political system can accomplish -- with its multiple veto points, supermajorities, weak party discipline and powerful special interests -- this will be remembered as a seminal achievement.

No, it is not—as, frankly, I expected--downplaying the phenomenon. But, rather, it has put four commentaries on the Times website on what’s “Behind the New U.S. Terror Cases.” No denial of the reality. No attack on American policy at home and abroad for provoking it. No accusation of excess in pursuing the problem. Just cool suggestions for what to do now that we know Muslim terrorism is here. Except for one catty little swipe at the Bushies regarding how wise the Obami were in ceasing to call any of this a “war on terror.”

Does the president know that Muslim terrorism is here? That’s another question.

And, in case you’re interested, not one of the contributors listed Israel as a cause of jihad at home.

By the way, Michelle Cottle has an article in the print edition of TNR (soon to be online) about Janet Napolitano, secretary of homeland security, whose credentials are not insignificant. Except for one thing: She knew nothing about terrorism and, thus, nothing about homeland security. Maybe she’s learned something. But on-the-job training is not what the position requires.