Where are my keys?

“ See, it’s not that the Democrats are playing checkers and the Republicans are playing chess. It’s that the Republicans are playing chess and the Democrats are in the nurse’s office because, once again, they’ve glued their balls to their thighs.

—

- Jon Stewart, on Monday’s The Daily Show

It is staggering that the Democratic Party is basically conceding defeat on an issue that has been at the forefront of what the American liberal movement has been aiming to achieve for decades because of a special election loss that cuts their Senate majority to 18.

What kind of a mess does a party have to be to be unable to figure something out on this front? Massachusetts Democrat Rep. Bill Delahunt suggested this morning the health reform bill — the gutted, weakened, shadow-of-its-original-self health reform bill — be split up. He suggested tackling one problem (denial of coverage on the basis of preexisting conditions, for example) at a time in a more specific, easier to understand (read: harder to spin) piece of reform.

An interesting idea. Where were they before?