When Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC) stated a few months back about how a defeat of the President’s health care bill would be “The President’s Waterloo”, partisan hacks huffed and puffed about the creative analogy. One side said the crack smacked of partisanship that it represented a mean and capricious streak of those opposed to socialized medicine; the other side gleefully picked up the zinger and ran with it. My only comment is that the battle of Waterloo, where a coalition of countries led by the British stopped the Napolean and the French Army in 1815, pales in comparison to a more accurate battlefield analogy to the health care bill skirmish – it’s Obama’s Stalingrad.

The battle for Stalingrad was perhaps the most important combat campaign of WWII. It ranks up there with Midway, the Battle of the Bulge, the Battle of Britain and the fight for Iwo Jima. In a city roughly the size of Pittsburgh, during a brutal Russian winter, the unstoppable German Wermcht was checked for the first time since their invasion of Poland two years earlier.

The similarities between Obama’s overreaching and the conceit of the German high command, combined with Hitler’s megalomania, caused the entire German Sixth Army to be wiped out. It marked the beginning of the end for the Third Reich, alough the bitter end would not come for the Nazis until almost four years later. Jospeh Goebbels, the chief propagandist for the Nazis, chirped that the annihilation of so many German men was actually a blessing for the war effort – now, claimed Goebbels, the Germans would have to immerse themselves in the concept of “total war” to beat the Allies. With passage of the bill, Members of Congress who voted for the bill are claiming some sort of incredible Goebbels’s type victory, only if to keep their own false hopes up.  

Turning away from the battle analogy, there is a small upside for the President in all this. His toes will have touched the bottom of the pool, and he’ll have no where to go but up. He’ll guarantee himself another term in office if he’s able to shake off his ham fisted efforts on getting this legislation poured into the voter’s mouths and pivot his considerable powers of persuasion in taking on the economic challenges of the United States in a serious manner.

This legislative battle has left so many bodies and debris littered across the political landscape that I predict the White House and Congressional leadership will simply “bunker in” and wait for their own political version of the “Battle for Berlin” (in this case, the mid term elections) and unfortunately, continue to ignore the economy and the concerns of our overseas allies.

Matt Crow joined Reagan Administration in 1987; worked in both Bush 41 and 43 Administrations; plays to a 19 golf handicap and loves to vacation at the beach with his wife and children.