The American Prospect has two great articles today.

The first, Victory at What Cost? by Mark Schmitt offers a series of insights:

Every major policy victory, even though it creates momentum and potentially strengthens the president who leads it, inevitably comes with a cost.  The cost may be an expenditure of political capital, a political concession due in the future, a sacrifice of a constituency, a compromise on some other policy, or a compromise within the policy itself. It’s hard not to feel in one’s gut that this victory came at a considerable price. But it’s also hard to put one’s finger on exactly where the cost is. [snip]

A more plausible price of victory is the emergence of a left opposition to Obama and to mainstream Democrats  . . . [snip]

Republican senators’ refusal to participate in any meaningful way in the health-care conversation, with the small and notable exception of Maine Sen. Olympia Snowe’s single, hesitating vote when the bill was before the Finance Committee, is a painful revelation that Obama can’t govern the way he campaigned. And that revelation is in itself a kind of cost, a useful illusion now lost. As recently as a few weeks ago, every savvy Hill insider would tell you that health reform might get 58 votes and fail, or it might get 61 or 62 votes. But it wouldn’t, couldn’t get exactly 60 votes, just because some Democrats — Ben Nelson, Blanche Lincoln, Mary Landrieu — would insist on Republican cover. The biggest surprise of the last week is that health reform had to hit that target 60-vote target exactly, and that it did.[snip]

The reason it feels like a loss is simply that fact, that any sense of movement or possibility in our political institutions — and again, I mean mostly the Senate but not only the Senate — is gone. Getting exactly 60 votes, on an issue where the ground has been prepared, is possible only on rare occasions. That Obama, and Harry Reid and his allies, hit that small target on the single issue that has eluded every progressive president before him is wonderful for both the health-care system, and for those millions who need care, but still, it does not bode well for our political future.

I’ve always argued that Obama viewed his central domestic mission as changing the culture and practice of American politics. The passage of health reform is a revelation of just how desperately that change is needed and how difficult it will be to achieve.

The second article by Paul Starr, Obama Year One, is like the first, a meditation on on the challenges of change in US politics.  Starr observes:

Policy has certainly not moved as fast or as far as many of us would like. But perhaps because I never shared the political fantasies about Obama in the first place, I don’t feel let down, and I don’t think other liberals should. No president was about to turn the country around on a dime — the structure of our government doesn’t allow it. And anyone who paid attention to what Obama said as a candidate about specific matters of policy would have realized he wasn’t the lefty some imagined and others feared.

It is a myth, as the historian David Greenberg argues in the January issue of The Atlantic, that great presidents always leave their mark in the first year. Abraham Lincoln had an inglorious debut; John F. Kennedy’s first year was a failure. Even Franklin Roosevelt, who is the model for whirlwind transformation because of the bold initiatives of his first 100 days, got off to a false start with the National Recovery Administration. It took another two years to pass Social Security and the Wagner Act, and it was not until the war that necessity drove FDR to adopt Keynesian policies sufficient to end the Depression.[snip]

His party’s congressional majority is no guarantee of action since the Democrats are more ideologically diverse than the Republicans. That is the reason they are in the majority — and the reason they cannot take full advantage of it. As a result of the now-routine use of the filibuster, nothing but the budget can get through the Senate with fewer than 60 votes, and those 60 include Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson.Of course, Obama will be even more constrained if Democrats suffer major losses this coming November because of discouragement among the party’s progressive base. To mobilize voters in the fall, he has to be inspiring; to get things done before then, he has to be patient and analytical. Fortunately, Obama combines those qualities better than anyone else in politics today.

The two articles strike at something that has been too rarely discussed – the Democratic party is ideologically diverse, far more so than the Republican party, and the peace between the progressive, moderate and conservative wing of the party that emerged in 2006 was never more than a temporary truce as the party’s various wings united against the unmitigated disaster that was the Bush administration and the Republican Congress. 

Obama’s winning 2008 coalition needs to hold together of its own accord, without him.  Let’s see if that can happen.