David Frum's is the voice of reason...

...in the Republican Party. (I know, I know; that sounds like an oxymoron.) In fact, he may very well be the last voice of reason in the GOP, especially after their disastrous defeat on health care. (I'm not even sure if the Republicans realize just yet how devastating was their defeat.) Yesterday, for example, John McCain said:

...that the anger was so intense over the parliamentary tactics on health care that Mr. Obama should not expect any help from Republicans. “There will be no cooperation for the rest of the year,” (my emphasis) Mr. McCain told an Arizona radio station. “They have poisoned the well in what they’ve done and how they’ve done it.”

My wife, who doesn't follow politics (she's normal), heard that and said, "Okay, that's enough of that." (I started to tell her about his primary challenge from J. D. Hayworth, the tea partier, but decided not to bother.)

Calls for repeal were everywhere yesterday, even (especially) from Mitt Romney, the Republican front-runner for 2012. (It was upon Romney's reform in Massachusetts that Obamacare was based.) It was almost painful to hear the poor guy practically tie himself up in knots in trying to distance himself from his own accomplishment. From Frum (sorry, I didn't choose his last name):

Romneycare invented a mechanism to buy insurance with before tax dollars, just like Obamacare: the exchange. It more tightly regulated insurance practices, just like Obamacare. It imposed an individual mandate to buy insurance, and offered subsidies to those who could not afford it, just like … you get the idea.

Devil is in the details as always of course. I’m sure a President Romney would have produced a different result than President Obama. But how different?

And if a President Romney had produced a plan based on his Massachusetts experience that did enlarge coverage, eliminate some of the worst abuses of the insurance industry, and set the country on track to slowing down the growth of healthcare costs – wouldn’t he have regarded that as a huge success?

Now Romney is denouncing a plan based upon his own supreme achievement. But if Romneycare is a disaster when it goes national, then why elect its author to national office?

And from another piece with the title, "Waterloo":

A huge part of the blame for today’s disaster attaches to conservatives and Republicans ourselves.

At the beginning of this process we made a strategic decision: unlike, say, Democrats in 2001 when President Bush proposed his first tax cut, we would make no deal with the administration.
No negotiations, no compromise, nothing. We were going for all the marbles. This would be Obama’s Waterloo – just as healthcare was Clinton’s in 1994.

Only, the hardliners overlooked a few key facts: Obama was elected with 53% of the vote, not Clinton’s 42%. The liberal block within the Democratic congressional caucus is bigger and stronger than it was in 1993-94. And of course the Democrats also remember their history, and also remember the consequences of their 1994 failure.

This time, when we went for all the marbles, we ended with none.

Could a deal have been reached? Who knows? But we do know that the gap between this plan and traditional Republican ideas is not very big. The Obama plan has a broad family resemblance to Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts plan. It builds on ideas developed at the Heritage Foundation in the early 1990s that formed the basis for Republican counter-proposals to Clintoncare in 1993-1994. (Again, my emphasis.)

Barack Obama badly wanted Republican votes for his plan. Could we have leveraged his desire to align the plan more closely with conservative views? To finance it without redistributive taxes on productive enterprise – without weighing so heavily on small business – without expanding Medicaid? Too late now. They are all the law.

No illusions please: This bill will not be repealed. Even if Republicans scored a 1994 style landslide in November, how many votes could we muster to re-open the “doughnut hole” and charge seniors more for prescription drugs? How many votes to re-allow insurers to rescind policies when they discover a pre-existing condition? How many votes to banish 25 year olds from their parents’ insurance coverage? And even if the votes were there – would President Obama sign such a repeal?

We followed the most radical voices in the party and the movement, and they led us to abject and irreversible defeat. (Yep, me again.)

There were leaders who knew better, who would have liked to deal. But they were trapped. Conservative talkers on Fox and talk radio had whipped the Republican voting base into such a frenzy that deal-making was rendered impossible. How do you negotiate with somebody who wants to murder your grandmother? Or – more exactly – with somebody whom your voters have been persuaded to believe wants to murder their grandmother?

I have some advice for Republicans going forward: find another issue to run on. You lost this one (badly) and can only shoot yourself in the foot further by going on and on about something that will never happen: repeal.

I have some even better advice: start listening to David Frum.