Politics & Power Quote by Sidney Blumenthal

A line like this doesn’t argue policy so much as prosecute a fiasco. “Virtually every political error” is a maximalist verdict that flatters itself with reasonableness: the hedge word “virtually” pretends to be careful even as it paints a total rout. Blumenthal, a journalist steeped in Democratic trench warfare, is doing what sharp political writing often does at its best and worst: compressing a messy timeline of misreads, bad sequencing, and self-inflicted messaging wounds into a single sentence that feels like history’s gavel.

The intent is to assign competence-judgment, not moral judgment. He’s not saying the goal of health care reform was wrong; he’s saying the execution ignored the basic physics of American politics: interest-group panic, partisan incentives, and the public’s tendency to distrust complexity, especially when opponents get to name it first. “Could be made” matters: it implies these weren’t unforeseeable accidents but avoidable blunders, the kind a seasoned operator should have anticipated.

The subtext is intra-liberal disappointment. It’s the language of an ally who feels embarrassed on behalf of his side, which makes the critique sting more than conservative sniping. There’s also a media-aware cynicism here: health care is the arena where process becomes scandal. A bill can be substantively defensible and still politically radioactive if it looks confusing, secretive, or patronizing. Blumenthal’s sentence is built to travel: quotable, prosecutorial, and vague enough to let readers plug in their own catalog of errors, from legislative tactics to public messaging to coalition management.