Michael Barone:

“My colleague Mark Tapscott cites an anonymous quote by a House Democratic leader from a Politico story on why the House Democratic leadership can’t muster the votes needed to pass the Senate health care bill. “‘You just need to twist enough arms to pass the Senate bill.’ You can twist arms if you’ve got a handful of them to twist. You can’t twist over 100 arms. There needs to be some reality check there.” Mark takes that as an indication that House Democrats are short 100 votes of passing the Senate bill.

Clever liberals in the blogosphere are still urging House Democrats to pass the Senate health care bill, with the Senate then making changes through the reconciliation process requiring only 51 votes and the Senate going along. Sounds like a clever idea. But as my Examiner colleague Mark Tapscott writes, an anonymous quote from a House Democratic leader suggests that they are 100 votes short of passing the Senate bill. I wouldn’t take that 100 votes as a precise number, but as an approximation.”

It’s about right. Barone hits on a point, that the number of democrats willing to stand for Obama’s agenda is dwindling, fast. Remember when Bush hit his lows in 2008 how Republicans began to distance themselves from him. Ah, that greatest of all characteristics of every politician, job security will prevail every time.

Whether or not Obama becomes a “centrist”, a move I remind you that no one will buy as genuine, the unmistakable fact is that democrats in congress will definitely move that way as they see it as the only way to keep their seats. In Washington it’s known that you have no real friends past your last vote and as we saw during the 2008 campaign it gets real crowded under the bus.

Obama is about to become the loneliest man in town.

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