LONDON -- Could Prime Minister Gordon Brown become the Harry Truman of British politics?

For many long months, Brown and his Labor Party were written off as sure losers in this year's election, likely to be called for May 6. David Cameron, the young, energetic and empathetic Conservative Party leader, was all but handed Brown's job by the chattering classes, so consistent and formidable had been his lead in the polls.

When I was growing up, the filibuster was hardly ever used--except, of course, by the Dixiecrats (southern Democratic senators, racists mostly) and some conservative Republicans. When civil rights legislation was introduced by liberal Democrats, the right wing of the party would mobilize and stage real filibusters, senators often orating for a dozen hours at a time and then leaving the podium only for another recalcitrant. These legislators did not much disguise their intentions in procedural balderdash.

Crisis and Command: A History of Executive Power from George Washington to George W. Bush

By John Yoo

(Kaplan, 544 pp., $29.95)

Bomb Power: The Modern Presidency and the National Security State

By Garry Wills

(Penguin, 288 pp., $27.95)

I.

In December 2008, Chris Wallace asked Vice President Cheney, “If the president, during war, decides to do something to protect the country, is it legal?” Cheney’s answer included a reference to a military authority that President Bush did not exercise. “The President of the United States,” he said, “now for fifty years is followed at all times, twenty-four hours a day, by a military aide carrying a football that contains the nuclear codes that he would use and be authorized to use in the event of a nuclear attack on the United States.” The vice president added that the president “could launch the kind of devastating attack the world has never seen” without checking with Congress or the courts, and noted also that “he has that authority because of the nature of the world we live in.” And then he shifted to the war on terrorism: “It’s unfortunate, but I think we’re perfectly appropriate to take the steps we have.”

Over the next few weeks, as the House and Senate forge a compromise between their respective health care reform bills, most of the attention will be on the high-profile issues like abortion and taxes. But there are myriad other issues that, although less visible to the public, could go a long way towards determining the success of health care reform--and the health care system more generally. High on this list is the seemingly technical question of what Medicaid pays primary care physicians.

WASHINGTON--At a White House dinner with a group of historians at the beginning of the summer, Robert Dallek, a shrewd student of both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, offered a chilling comment to President Obama.

"In my judgment," he recalls saying, "war kills off great reform movements."

I confess to reading people on the right. Sometimes with utter dismay. Oftentimes with respect. Among the people I read regularly is Peter Wehner who actually writes for Commentary's website, Contentious, with other conservative intellectuals. And very contentious they are. Wehner actually was one of George Bush's speechwriters. Since I thought some of Bush's speeches quite alright--and even better--this fact is not a disqualifier.

Indeed, Wehner is one smart guy ... and a stylish writer besides. What's more, he knows his history. Today, he's dug into the history of the Cold War, an era not so strategically remote from our own. Except that the enemy is militarily far weaker than we are but stronger in the fact that it hides behind civilians--committed to it and utterly indifferent to it--which, given our scruples, provides enormous advantages to our foe.

This is the circumstance that permits the Goldstone panel, installed by the oh, so impartial Human Rights Council, to accuse Israel of war crimes. Moreover, it is the setting for charging the United States and NATO in Afghanistan also with war crimes.

Barack Obama looks like he will succeed where three Democratic presidents, Harry Truman, Jimmy Carter, and Bill Clinton, so famously failed--by passing health care reform. That is an achievement for which posterity will likely reward him. But it may not help him and his party avoid setbacks at the polls.

A lot of people care about what happens to our health care system. But not a lot of people understand what’s actually being proposed--or even have time to figure it out. And even those who do follow the debate closely may not always know what’s important, what isn’t, and so on. (Even I get confused sometimes.)

Part of the problem is that judging reform actually requires asking several different questions. There’s the economic security issue: Will it expand insurance coverage substantially--and make sure the insurance people have is good insurance? There’s the cost question: Will it pay for itself--and will it reduce costs over the long run? And there’s the matter of quality: Will it actually make medical care better?

To help people sort this out, we’ve decided to develop a relatively straightforward scoring system. We’ve gone to some of our favorite experts and asked them to judge various reform plans on these criteria. Then, using a specially weighted composite of those numbers--more on the weighting in a moment--we compile an overall score. The scores will go from one (bad) to ten (good). And we’re calling it the Truman scale.

The name is a tribute to the president who first tried seriously to pass national health care reform: Harry Truman. Theodore Roosevelt talked about health care reform and Franklin Roosevelt thought about it, but Truman was the first who made a serious effort. He failed, of course, as did every president who’s tried since. But we’ve gotten closer each time and, as things stand, chances seem good that President Obama might actually succeed.  If so, he--and all of us--will owe Truman a debt of gratitude.

Now, about that weighting. This is where I, your friendly neighborhood health care policy wonk, get to set the priorities.  The security score will count three times, the cost question twice, and the quality once.  My thinking is that cost and quality are pretty closely related and that, together, they should count as much as security.

As for the experts, their names appear at the bottom of the score sheet. I promised to keep their individual scores confidential, although they’ve given permission to quote specific comments.

In 1949, a year after the state of Israel was created, its Chief Rabbi visited President Harry Truman in Washington. Isaac Halevi Herzog told Truman that his role in helping the Jewish state achieve its independence was not just a matter of politics and diplomacy; it was a divine mission. "When the President was still in his mother’s womb," Herzog said, "the Lord had bestowed upon him the mission of helping his Chosen People at a time of despair and aiding in the fulfillment of His promise of Return to the Holy Land." Truman was a 20th-century version of King Cyrus of Persia, who had permitted the Israelites to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem in the 6th century B.C.E.: "he had been given the task once fulfilled by the mighty king of Persia, and that he too, like Cyrus, would occupy a place of honor in the annals of the Jewish people."

While it was a bit choppy, I'd have to say Obama's speech today was an epochal stride towards dismantling the conservative advantage on foreign policy--attacking its rhetorical substructure in way Democrats have not done before.

Ok, it can't help but make me sound like a conspiracy theorist, but the fact that John McCain's victory speech was staged in front of a huge banner announcing the fact that he won '1191 delegates' can't help but recall Rudy Giuliani and his denial of death strategy.

In a spacious Hilton ballroom yesterday, surrounded by middle-aged construction workers with their arms folded and collars unbuttoned, Joe Biden is barking into his microphone. "With or without your endorsement," he declares, "I'm going to be the best friend labor has ever had in the White House!" It's an outlandish claim--FDR? Harry Truman?--but not out of place.

When I came to Washington from Baltimore in 1974, I had reason to be interested in a profound question: Do Republicans make better poker players than Democrats? My $15,000 salary at the Baltimore Sun remained unchanged, but the mortgage on my new house was four times the old one. So my Friday night game, which often lasted until 6 a.m., became a matter of survival.

As activists on the right gather this week in Washington, D.C., for the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), TNR has dipped into our archives to bring you a look back at some of the forces that have shaped the GOP. Before Thomas Schaller wrote his famous tract Whistling Past Dixie: How the Democrats Can Win Without the South, TNR contributor Michael Lind wrote an impressive account of the Southernization of the Republican Party. Pegged to the Republicans' Contract with America and electoral landslide in 1994, Lind compiled an impressive, comprehensive history of the decline of northern, Nelson Rockefeller-style Republicanism and the rise of a new crop of Southern GOP leaders. “Is there a way out of this?” asked Lind. “The construction of a national, political and social response to the Southern coup will require a long, and difficult, period of sustained effort. But it can only begin if Democrats--and those few principled Republicans who are left--actively contest the claim of the Southern-dominated GOP that it now speaks in any way for a new American majority.” With the conservative movement gaining momentum and some commentators predicting a Democratic walloping in 2010 akin to that of 1994, Lind’s piece is essential reading for those who want to understand the past, present, and future of the GOP.

When the new Republican Congress was sworn in last January, the South finally conquered Washington. The defeated Democratic leadership had been almost exclusively from the Northeast, the Midwest and the Pacific Northwest, with Speaker Tom Foley of Washington, Majority Leader Dick Gephardt of Missouri and Majority Whip David Bonior of Michigan in the House, and, on the Senate side, Majority Leader George Mitchell from Maine. The only Southerner in the Democratic congressional leadership was Senate Majority Whip Wendell Ford of Kentucky. By contrast, all but one of the new leaders of the Republican Congress hail from a former state of the Confederacy: Speaker Newt Gingrich is a Georgian, House Majority Leader Dick Armey and Whip Tom DeLay are both Texans and Senate Majority Whip Trent Lott is from Mississippi. Only Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole of Kansas remains as a fossil of the era in which the GOP was a party of the Midwest and the Northeast that seldom received a Southern vote. Strom Thurmond, the 1948 presidential candidateof the segregationist States' Rights Party, the so-called Dixiecrats, is now chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee--a grim irony, inasmuch as the integration of the armed forces was one of the reforms that inspired Thurmond to bolt from Harry Truman's Democratic Party in the first place.