Harold Meyerson

By accident of its birth -- a collection of separate colonies that slowly came together to form an independent union and revolted against the remote power of the British government -- the United States has an enduring bias toward localism, an aversion to centralized government that is part of its DNA. For some on the left, this has been seen as a positive. "It is one of the happy incidents of the federal system that a single courageous state may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country," Justice Louis Brandeis once wrote.

President Obama's trip to China has occasioned a spate of articles documenting the increasingly unhappy yet apparently indissoluble marriage between the American and Chinese economies. As The Post's Keith Richburg wrote on Monday, those economies "have become inextricably intertwined, locked in a kind of co-dependency that neither side thinks is particularly healthy."

A catastrophic change has overtaken the Senate in recent years. Initially conceived as the body that would cool the passions of the House and consider legislation with a more Olympian perspective, the Senate has become a body that shuns debate, avoids legislative give-and-take, proceeds glacially and produces next to nothing.

The health-care reform bills emerging from the House and Senate, when melded and enacted, will constitute an epochal achievement: the near-universal provision of medical care to the American people. But the House version is clearly the more epochal, as the health coverage it provides is more universal, chiefly because it's more affordable.

Only once in his nearly half-century as a United States senator did Ted Kennedy face a serious re-election challenge. It came from a young Republican challenger, Mitt Romney, in that most Republican of years, 1994. It came, as well, just three years after Kennedy's night out with his nephew William Kennedy Smith and the ensuing spate of tabloid stories that depicted Kennedy as a superannuated Prince Hal.

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With Harry Reid's announcement Monday that he will send a bill containing a "public option" to the Senate floor, the biggest remaining difference between the pending Senate and House versions of health-care legislation may well come down to how to fund this $900 billion reform. On the House side, Speaker Nancy Pelosi has proposed that the lion's share of funding come from a surtax on the wealthiest Americans -- individuals who make more than $500,000 a year or couples who make more than $1 million. Pelosi's surtax would raise an estimated $460 billion, more than half of health reform's projected decennial cost.

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