'This is Political Jonestown'

As the liberal media rejoices over Obama's big victory, one achieved with strong-arm tactics and backrooms deals, it may be a victory that doesn't last long.

What passed last night was but a dim shadow of the massive new entitlement program he had promised, but it was a major victory still.

In recent weeks, Obama has feverishly tried to recapture the magic of his presidential campaign by comparing his efforts to those of Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt.

He has compared his widely disliked health-care legislation to Roosevelt's Social Security Act, which was highly popular and passed Congress by wide majorities from both parties.

And he has donned a stovepipe hat and imagined himself as Lincoln saving the Union.

As absurd as Obama's audacity is, his visions of autobiographical grandeur are not without reason here, inside the Beltway.

When he looks up and down his flank at his fellow warriors, he sees Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. In this land of midgets, Obama is a titan.

He had little trouble suckering the midgets into sacrificing themselves for his presidency.

Come next January Reid will be in forced retirement and Pelosi won't be carrying around a giant gavel with a sh-t-eating grin on her face.

Despite his silky rhetoric, when push came to shove, he adopted the partisan hardball beloved by lefty bloggers to forestall serious compromise and work his ideological will.

Obama stands exposed as the kind of unabashed liberal Democrat who hasn't won a presidential election since 1964. The first electoral test for this iteration of Obama, shorn of all pretense to moderation, comes in November.

The mid-term elections will in large part be a referendum on health care, as the exclamation point on top of a vaulting agenda of government aggrandizement.

Democrats won the battle within their caucus to pass a large-scale bill that threatens to change the relationship between citizen and government. But they haven't yet won the battle for the country.

That begins today.

Indeed, the Kool-aid drinkers will be mass casualties.

Whether Obama and Pelosi can buy the American people as cheaply as they bought the House remains to be seen. Certainly the bill is chock-a-block with goodies that will sound terrific -- or will until the bill arrives at some point in the not-too-distant future.

But soon will come November, and -- perhaps -- a day of reckoning.

As veteran Democratic pollster Pat Caddell put it: "The people who are opposing [health-care reform] are holding tea parties. The Democrats are holding a Kool-Aid party. This is political Jonestown."