After two Democrat presidencies upended by health care, will the certitudes change?

In fact, the Brown election can be seen as the closing of the door on a two-decade era in which Democrats, Republicans, and most of the political class came to believe that the Democrats possessed an inherent electoral advantage on the health-care issue. The history of the past 20 years reveals two Democratic presidencies, first Bill Clinton’s and now Barack Obama’s, upended by health care, whereas a single administration—that of a Republican, George W. Bush—benefited from it. In 2004, Bush was able to secure a narrow re-election victory in part because of his success in securing a form of targeted health-care reform through the creation of a Medicare prescription-drug benefit.

The combination of Democratic wishful thinking and an American electorate suspicious of the intentions of those pushing relentlessly for an ever greater government involvement in health care has proved a ballot-box disaster for Democrats. How did this happen? And why?