Harold Meyerson

“A president with an activist agenda met a Senate all but incapable of action. The mix of big government and no government proved toxic for the Democrats.” It's there in "Hamlet," in Shakespeare's most famous soliloquy. Item, under reasons "not to be": "the law's delay." Shakespeare meant court proceedings, but there are times in a nation's life when this could just as well refer to lawmaking. To take forever to pass one law -- to take the entire first year of Barack Obama's presidency -- might be permissible if all else were well, or if other needed legislation were not held up until that one law, the reform of American health care, were enacted.

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The filibuster is an affront to the most basic principles of democracy, and California's senators should take the lead in getting rid of the tactic.

It's been a maddening year for California liberals. In the 2008 election, Barack Obama carried the state by a stunning 24 points. He took office with a distinctly progressive agenda and with heavy Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress. A moment of liberal breakthrough -- another 1935 or 1965 -- seemed at hand. And then . . . nothing happened.

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One of the few things we can be sure of when Congress finally enacts health-care reform is that the battle will rage on, unabated. Republicans will attack the law's weaknesses (and strengths), while Democrats will point to provisions that are popular and take effect immediately, such as the ban on insurers denying coverage for preexisting conditions.

But there are some provisions in the pending legislation that, if included in the final bill, may well drape Democratic candidates with "Kick Me" signs come November. One of these is the excise tax on more costly health insurance policies, a feature of the Senate bill that President Obama supports but that is opposed by organized labor and most House Democrats. Another is the fine to be paid by individuals who decline any coverage -- it's a relatively small amount (the Senate bill sets it at $95 for the first year) but an issue that could loom large in the political wars to come.

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Every Democratic president since Lyndon Johnson -- Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama -- has raised the hope that he would bring with him a new era of progressive reform. The legislative torrents of the New Deal and the Great Society -- a few brief years in the 1930s and the '60s that fundamentally reshaped the nation's economy and society -- are the templates that fire the liberal imagination.

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The Net roots is up in arms about the Senate's version of health-care reform, with many rooters demanding it be voted down. The liberal establishmentarians lament the compromises they were compelled to accept but support the bill's passage. In between the two, indignant and stuck, is organized labor.

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So who's for reviving American manufacturing? American manufacturers? Well, some of them, under certain conditions. The American people? Most of them, under most conditions. The American government? Well, parts of it. Sometimes.

Reviving American manufacturing may be an economic and strategic necessity, without which our trade deficit will continue to climb, our credit-based economy will produce and consume even more debt, and our already-rickety ladders of economic mobility, up which generations of immigrants have climbed, may splinter altogether. That's no guarantee, however, that American manufacturing will actually be revived. The forces arrayed against it -- chiefly, finance and big retailers, Wall Street and Wal-Mart -- have tremendous political clout.

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