To bolster their case that the Obama White House didn’t have much influence over the health care bill, defenders of the administration also made this rather weird argument: that Bush/Cheney had a hard time getting their agenda through Congress.

At the time, I argued the opposite, that in fact, Bush pretty much had his way with Congress during his first term, ramming through the biggest tax cuts in twenty years via reconciliation and taking us into Baghdad with absolutely no moderate Republican opposition.

Here’s Ezra Klein’s response to that post.

I’m not sure what good it does for progressives to delude themselves about Bush’s success in passing pure domestic policy initiatives that easily overcame the opposition of Republican moderates, but the reality is that he saw his initiatives watered down at every turn. [...]

There’s a sort of comfort in believing that George W. Bush got everything he wanted, because it suggests that if liberals could only emulate his tactics, they too could get everything they want.

That was written on September 9, 2009, two months after we now know that Obama had gotten exactly the bill he wanted through backroom deals with hospital lobbyists.

Who was deluding themselves?