Franken was right. The Democrats were getting the crap kicked out of them. Obama's standing sank in the polls, the healthcare plan attracted shrinking support, and the Tea Party grew bolder and angrier. And why wouldn't they? The Republicans succeeded brilliantly the last time, when Bill and Hillary Clinton tried to give America the same civilising protection enjoyed in every other industrialised country, some form of publicly mediated health insurance. The Republicans routed them in 1993, and took majority control of the Congress a year later. The Republicans were working to repeat this plan, the seething conservative Tea Party mosh pit served to mobilise popular outrage. It magnified the attention, anger and abuse. The Tea Party got so worked up it couldn't tell if Obama was a socialist, a communist - Mao Zedong they called him - or a fascist - he was Josef Stalin, then Adolf Hitler. They threw it all at him in a frenzy of invective. Their presidential hopeful Sarah Palin was happy to sponsor the misinformation that Obama's plan would force citizens to appear before "death panels". Urged on by talkback's Rush Limbaugh and Fox News's Glenn Beck, they rallied under the chant "kill the bill" and hysteria built.

Then Obama pivoted. Suddenly, the world saw his strategy for the first time. He and the Democratic leaders in Congress abruptly abandoned bipartisanship, marshalled their forces, swiftly drove their bills through the Congress and declared victory. The margin was slender, 219 votes to 212 in the House of Representatives; even 34 Democrats voted no. But it was a win on Obama's signature reform, and the President himself clinched it by wooing a final handful of wavering Democrats. The fringe elements among the Republicans' shock troops discredited the conservative resistance by going beyond all reasonable bounds. Tea Party protesters surged up to the Capitol as congressmen entered to vote, screaming "nigger" at black legislators and "faggot" at a gay member. One spat on the black congressman Emanuel Cleaver. The most senior black congressman, James Clyburn, said: "I have heard things today that I have not heard since March 15, 1960, when I was marching to get off the back of the bus." After the vote passed, it grew worse. Ten Democratic Congress members reported getting death threats or suffering harassment or acts of vandalism. The leader of the House Republicans, John Boehner, felt obliged to call for better behaviour. The ugly violence "isn't the American way", he said.

A conservative columnist in The Wall Street Journal, the former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan, wrote of a sense of something bad about to happen: "It's a world full of people always cocking the gun and ready to say, if things turn bad, 'But I didn't tell anyone to shoot!' One of them, the Democrats cry, is Sarah Palin. She told followers by Twitter last week after the vote: 'Don't Retreat, Instead - RELOAD!''' Although Noonan blamed both sides of politics and although Palin said she was using only the metaphors of arms and not urging actual violence, the politics is rebounding against the Republicans. "At the next election, I think Obama can say, 'Did I not attempt again and again to reach out'?'' says Jim Loftus, a former Democratic White House staffer and aide to the Obama campaign, who is visiting Australia as part of a stood-down presidential advance party. "By calling a modern politician like Obama a communist, the Republicans have invited eye-rolling and alienated the most important voters - the persuadable ones," says Loftus, now a political consultant. "And Obama gets to appeal to a sense of fairness." It's not only Democrats who think so. In a much-remarked blog, the former George W. Bush speechwriter and author of the phrase "axis of evil", David Frum, wrote: "Conservatives and Republicans today suffered their most crushing legislative defeat since the 1960s."

He blamed the strategic decision to refuse any of Obama's attempts at compromise: "We followed the most radical voices in the party and the movement, and they led us to abject and irreversible defeat. There were leaders who knew better, who would have liked to deal. But they were trapped. Conservative talkers on Fox and talk radio had whipped the Republican voting base into such a frenzy that deal-making was rendered impossible. ''How do you negotiate with somebody who wants to murder your grandmother? Or - more exactly - with somebody whom your voters have been persuaded to believe wants to murder their grandmother?" Frum, who lost a position at the conservative American Enterprise Institute in retaliation for writing this analysis, is troubled by the newly revealed reality of US politics: Obama is a reasonable, results-driven President, and his opponents are extremists. No one is calling Obama weak now. I don't know whether he's read Sun Tzu's The Art of War, but it's as if he read this much: "If your opponent is temperamental, seek to irritate him. Pretend to be weak, that he may grow arrogant." Peter Hartcher is the Herald's political editor.