Obamacare: The Coming Retreat

(By Charles Krauthammer, The Washington Post) - Yesterday, Barack Obama was God. Today, he's fallen from grace, the magic gone, his health-care reform dead. If you believed the first idiocy -- and half the mainstream media did -- you'll believe the second. Don't believe either.

Conventional wisdom always makes straight-line projections. They are always wrong. Yes, Obama's aura has diminished, in part because of overweening overexposure. But by year's end he will emerge with something he can call health-care reform. The Democrats in Congress will pass it because they must. Otherwise, they'll have slain their own savior in his first year in office.

But that bill will look nothing like the massive reform Obama originally intended. The beginning of the retreat was signaled by Obama's curious reference -- made five times -- to "health-insurance reform" during his July 22 news conference.

Reforming the health-care system is dead. Cause of death? Blunt trauma administered not by Republicans, not even by Blue Dog Democrats, but by the green eyeshades at the Congressional Budget Office.