The Stake For Conservatives, Till It Hurts

Dan Gerstein on the significance of Barack Obama's abandonment of bipartisanship in health care policy:

For Democrats, this means the official end of Bill Clinton's popular "third way" approach to progressive policymaking, which aimed to synthesize the best ideas of both sides. Obama seemed to go both ways on the third way during the campaign, repudiating it at times to win over the left and embracing it at times to win over the middle. But now it's clear there will be little if any synthesizing or triangulating. The president and his allies on Capitol Hill are betting that the suspicion of government that Reagan cultivated for a generation has ebbed enough to buy their activist policies time to work. If they succeed, the left will have driven a stake into the philosophical heart of conservatism.