Earlier, Eric Boehlert highlighted a New York Times “news analysis” piece that blamed President Obama for the lack of bipartisanship in Washington.

That article contains at least one more basic flaw: One of the article's key themes is the possibility that health care reform will prove to be a political albatross for Democrats. Or, as the Times' put it, “political suicide” for the Democrats. One way that could happen, according to the Post, is if health care adds to deficits in the coming years: “If deficits soar, if the Congressional Budget Office's estimates prove fanciful, they will be able to argue that Mr. Obama expanded government at a time the country simply could not afford yet another entitlement.”

But the Times completely ignored the possibility that Republicans, in voting against health care, have handed Democrats a line of attack for decades to come. If health care reform works, and the CBO's estimates prove accurate, reform could be wildly popular, and Democrats will be able to remind voters time and time again that they created this popular program, and Republicans -- every single one of them -- voted against it.

There are, after all, a couple of rather famous precedents for this scenario. For decades, Democrats have been taking credit for creating Social Security and Medicare, and skewering Republicans for opposing those programs. One of the key Democratic lines of attack on Republican presidential nominee Bob Dole in 1996 was about Medicare -- including the fact that Dole had voted against creating the program more than thirty years earlier.

Republicans may have just opened themselves up to decades of reminders that they opposed a popular and deficit-reducing health care reform. Yet the media behaves as though the only political risk is to the Democrats.