Having already made one gigantic miscalculation, the Republicans now seem poised to make another.

Miscalculation No. 1 was to turn the health-care debate into a total zero-sum game, an all-or-nothing battle—the kind of fight that the Bible calls Armageddon, Marxist glee clubs call the Final Conflict, Zapatistas call “¡Victoria o muerte!,” and Senator Jim DeMint, Republican of South Carolina, calls “Waterloo.”

The approach succeeded, but in ironic fashion. David Frum, a conservative Republican who can’t seem to break his atavistic attachment to empirical reality, recalls how it all began:

At the beginning of this process we made a strategic decision: unlike, say, Democrats in 2001 when President Bush proposed his first tax cut, we would make no deal with the administration. No negotiations, no compromise, nothing. We were going for all the marbles. This would be Obama’s Waterloo—just as healthcare was Clinton’s in 1994.

The Republicans stuck to the strategy. They put on their big sideways hat, tucked their hand into their tunic, puffed out their chest, and marched into battle. It was Waterloo on the Potomac, all right—only Obama was the one who got to be the Duke of Wellington. Here’s Frum, embedded with Napoleon’s retreating army:

We followed the most radical voices in the party and the movement, and they led us to abject and irreversible defeat.

Senior military analyst Matt Yglesias points his swagger stick at one of the less-noticed reasons for the rout :

Credit for not buckling goes to Nancy Pelosi and other gutsy leaders. But it also goes to the GOP. They wouldn’t take “yes” for an answer when lots of people wanted to surrender and settle for something much smaller. Instead, whipped up into a frenzy of ideological fanaticism and overconfidence, they decided to take no prisoners. So nobody surrendered! And that’s how Mitch McConnell brought universal health care to America.

Miscalculation No. 2: the Republicans appear to have decided on a slogan for this fall’s midterm election. “Kill The Bill!” having fizzled, they’re saying they’ll go with “Repeal It!”

By the end of the day after Waterloo, Senator DeMint had introduced a measure to repeal the bill. Michael Steele, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, had announced, on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” that the party’s message for the midterms is “absolutely” about repealing the bill. And Mitt “Romneycare” Romney had posted a fatwa denouncing the bill (“an unconscionable abuse of power”) and its most prominent supporter (“President Obama has betrayed his oath to the nation”) and concluding with this battle cry:

For these reasons and more, the act should be repealed. That campaign begins today.

That Frum post explains why this may not be such a hot idea:

No illusions please: This bill will not be repealed. Even if Republicans scored a 1994-style landslide in November, how many votes could we muster to re-open the “doughnut hole” and charge seniors more for prescription drugs? How many votes to re-allow insurers to rescind policies when they discover a pre-existing condition? How many votes to banish 25-year-olds from their parents’ insurance coverage? And even if the votes were there—would President Obama sign such a repeal?

Not very likely—about as likely as the Republicans winning a sixty-seven-vote majority in the Senate, which is what they’d need to override a Presidential veto, and which (as Yglesias notes) they aren’t going to have even if, come November, they win every single Senate race in the country.

Of course, that won’t matter to them if they’re convinced that running against health-care reform will win them seats they otherwise wouldn’t get. But responsible Washington observers have been responsibly observing for months that it was obviously a terrible mistake for Obama to “focus” on health care at a time when “the American people” obviously wanted the “focus” to be on “jobs.”

As we now know, responsible Washington observers were wrong. But it is probably true that “jobs” are the main concern of a great many Americans, especially now that the health-care logjam has been broken. So for the next seven months the Republicans are going to “focus” not on jobs but on … health-care reform? And not on doing it but on getting rid of it?

I don’t think so.

P.S. One more quote from Frum, where he’s lamenting the fact that the talk radio, Fox News, and Tea Party crazies have persuaded and bullied Congressional Republican politicians into following them off the cliff: