Obama Got What He Wanted

Worth Clicking: Blasts from the past wound Romney

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December 21, 2009

Obama Got What He Wanted

Ezra Klein: "The health-care bill that looks likely to clear the Senate this week is not very close to the health-care bill most liberals want. But it is very close to the health-care bill that Barack Obama promised. Thanks to the magic of Google, it's easy enough to revisit the plan Obama campaigned on in light of the plan that seems likely to pass... You can debate whether Obama should have lashed himself to such an incremental and status-quo oriented approach, but you cannot argue that he kept it a secret."

Andrew Sullivan notes Obama "will have achieved something that no previous Democrat had managed: universal health insurance. This will be spun away by some. And maybe the infuriated left-liberals and the angry right-oppositionists will get some temporary respite from that. But guess what? He did it. It was as grueling a victory as the one in the primaries, and took even longer. But it was a victory, a substantive, enduring legislative victory the like of which no president has achieved since Reagan."

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Taegan D. Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites.

Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.

Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country, including the Washington Post, USA Today, Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, Chicago Tribune, Philadelphia Inquirer and Christian Science Monitor.

Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.

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December 21, 2009