In "The March of Folly," Barbara Tuchman asked, "Why do holders of high office so often act contrary to the way reason points and enlightened self-interest suggests?" Her assessment of self-deception -- "acting according to wish while not allowing oneself to be deflected by the facts" -- captures the conditions that are gripping President Obama and the Democratic Party leadership as they renew their efforts to enact health-care reform.Their blind persistence in the face of reality threatens to turn this political march of folly into an electoral rout in November. In the wake of the stinging loss in Massachusetts, there was a moment when the president and the Democratic leadership seemed to...

The undertakers of Bill Clinton's political doom showed up in Little Rock, Ark., in 1992 for a meeting with the president-elect two months before his inauguration. They were the leaders of the Democratic Congress, and they might as well have been draped in black crepe.
"You can trust us," House Speaker Tom Foley told Clinton, in an assurance as false as it was sincere. "We all want to make this administration succeed."
Two years later, Clinton stood among smoldering political ruins. Democrats had lost both houses of Congress. A Republican upstart had defeated Tom Foley. In trusting the Democratic leadership in Congress, Clinton had nearly destroyed his presidency.
He learned a bitter lesson...

Health reform is back from the dead. Many Democrats have realized that their electoral prospects will be better if they can point to a real accomplishment. Polling on reform — which was never as negative as portrayed — shows signs of improving. And I’ve been really impressed by the passion and energy of this guy Barack Obama. Where was he last year?
Paul Krugman
But reform still has to run a gantlet of misinformation and outright lies. So let me address three big myths about the proposed reform, myths that are believed by many people who consider themselves well-informed, but who have actually fallen for deceptive spin.The first of these myths, which has been all over...

WASHINGTON -- As the Afghanistan War intensifies -- Marja, soon Kandahar, and the steady arrival of 30,000 new American troops -- it has come to be seen as Obama's war.
Not so. It's become America's war. When the former opposition party -- habitually anti-war for the last four decades -- adopts, reaffirms and escalates a war begun by the habitually hawkish other party, partisanship falls away, and the war becomes nationalized.
And legitimized. Do you think if John McCain, let alone George W. Bush, were president, we would not see growing demonstrations protesting our continued presence in Iraq and the escalation of Afghanistan? That we wouldn't see a serious push in Congress to cut off...

The 'Special Report' roundtable discusses the parliamentary obstacles to health care reform.

Washington (CNN) -- House Democratic leaders hoping to pass a health care reform bill by the Easter congressional recess face increasingly difficult odds, as several of the party's rank-and-file have come out against the plan passed by the Senate in December.

Even if Democrats extract the votes to put ObamaCare over the top, it will at best be a Pyrrhic victory for them. Regardless of the outcome, this monstrosity might cost the Democrats the Congress this November, ruin the party for a long time and prematurely render Barack Obama a lame duck president for the rest of his term.So why didn't the Democrats pull back when they still had the chance? The reason is that both the Democratic Party and President Obama have mutually reinforcing blind spots that have rendered them incapable of seeing what's crystal clear to every other sentient being in the country: This was the wrong bill at the wrong...