Somewhere, Richard Nixon is smiling. In 1973, he vetoed the War Powers Act, insisting that it was unconstitutional. Congress overrode him, but almost every one of Nixon’s successors has agreed with his assessment of the resolution.

It took Pres. Barack Obama, though, to rip the War Powers Act into little pieces and sprinkle it over his Libyan intervention like the confetti in a premature victory parade.

The thrust of the War Powers Act is clear enough: Sixty days after reporting the start of a military intervention, the president must secure congressional authorization or a declaration of war, or remove our forces. Presidents have typically acted “consistent with,” but not “pursuant to,” the law’s provisions — basically, humoring Congress while never conceding the law’s constitutional legitimacy.

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If your heart didn’t sink when the Senate bill went over the top in the House last night and Democrats began chanting “Yes, we can” on the floor, you’re either not a conservative or inured to all disappointment. Conservatives will be temped to despair in the weeks ahead, as the magnitude of this defeat and its potential consequences sink in. But there are good reasons not to despair. Here are five:

Public opinion. Democrats were never able to convince the public of the merits of their reform — despite having the highest-profile platforms in American politics, including a president who wore out his teleprompter-festooned bully pulpit for a solid year. Liberals comforted themselves by saying that the bill gained popularity at the end. But look at the Wall Street Journal/NBC News polling on Obamacare. In September 2009, 39 percent thought it was a good idea, 41 percent a bad idea. In January, it was 33 a good idea, 46 a bad idea. The latest poll had it at 36-48 — basically flat from the beginning of the year. Fox News polling had the bill at 38 percent approval and 48 percent disapproval in mid-September 2009, then at 34-57 in December, and 35-55 in its latest survey — again, essentially flat. The public has displayed an irreducible reservoir of common sense throughout the debate, which will be something crucial to draw on during the fights to come.

Structured so can it be overturned. The classic play in entitlement politics is to hook people on the benefits, making repeal impossible and growth inevitable. Obamacare is built so the major benefits, the subsidies, don’t kick in for years. This is part of the fiscal ruse — if the benefits kicked in immediately, Democrats would have exceeded their politically dictated ceiling of $1 trillion in official costs over the first ten years. The delay means there’s time to reverse key aspects of the bill before they take effect.

There’s no doubt that this will be difficult. Democrats have created a fact on the ground in the form of the bill, which puts the power of inertia on their side. Republicans will have to defeat an incumbent president in 2012, never easy. And they will have to offer alternative policy ideas that carry the day. If the odds are against them, all of this is still within the realm of the possible. One way to look at it is that Obama and Nancy Pelosi won the debate within the Democratic caucus over whether to pass a maximalist bill. But they haven’t yet won the debate in the country, which will rumble on.

A moment of clarity. Democrats generally win national elections by posing as moderates. In 2006, congressional Democrats sounded like a reasonable alternative to a corrupt Republican party that was losing a major war. In 2008, Obama usually portrayed himself as a moderate post-partisan; if the nature of Obama’s governance had been blatantly forecast back then, he might not have won, despite the financial crisis, the unpopularity of Bush, and the weakness of McCain’s campaign.

It’s a long time until 2012, but the health-care bill and the way it passed will make it much harder for the president to obscure his ideological commitments. There’s even less reason than before for anyone to misunderstand what Obama and his Democratic party are fundamentally about.

The truth will out. Obama has been saying things about his bill that are untrue: It won’t make premiums do down; it won’t control costs; it won’t allow everyone who likes their current insurance arrangements to keep them. These false representations may well make the bill more unpopular rather than less after passage.

Democrats learned with the stimulus that it’s not much fun to defend a law that they vastly oversold prior to passage. They’ll have exactly the same experience with health-care reform. The legislation on which they’ve staked so much will not withstand its first contact with reality.

The GOP has been better than expected. I remember listening to a Republican congressional leader answer questions about health care at an off-the-record event back in early 2009, and feeling profoundly depressed. He sounded as if he’d already given up. It’s been a very pleasant surprise how Republicans rose to the occasion over the last year. The bill sank in public opinion mostly of its own weight, but Republicans were relentless in their critiques and held together to oppose it. If Mitch McConnell hadn’t held his caucus together, Scott Brown wouldn’t have become the 41st vote and almost brought the bill down. At the health-care summit, Republicans offered an alternative vision for an entirely different direction in reform and found a star to articulate it in Paul Ryan. They couldn’t stop the large Democratic majorities in the House and the Senate from passing the bill, but the way they performed provides hope for the ongoing debate.

None of the above means we should minimize what happened yesterday. It’s a severe blow. But if we are to recover, we can’t despair.

– Rich Lowry is editor of National Review.

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President Obama said last week, “Everything there is to say about health care has been said, and just about everybody has said it.” It does feel as though we’ve been arguing over health care forever and keep circling back over the same ground. But Obama’s wrong. There are three things that most liberals haven’t said and can’t admit to the public or to themselves:

1) They have a moral passion to cover the uninsured, and everything else is lip service. David Brooks was good on this yesterday, and David Ignatius made a similar point in the Washington Post the other day. Never underestimate the power of ideology and conviction in politics. Democrats are persisting in their present course because, more than anything else, they think it’s the right thing to do. That’s an admirable impulse, even if it’s woefully misapplied.

Politically, though, they can’t sell their plan solely on this basis. People might share the goal of covering the uninsured in the abstract, but not if it’s costly. This is where Obama’s utterly unconvincing focus on deficit reduction and controlling costs come in. It’s almost all pose and sleight of hand — because it’s not what Democrats care about, and it’s not why they are pushing themselves to the utmost to pass the bill.

2) The bill is unpopular. Sometimes liberals will draw an analogy to the surge, an unpopular policy that proved correct in the long run. But mostly they come up with weak excuses for the bill’s poor showing in polls.

It’s because it’s been demagogued by Sarah Palin! The “death panel” line had resonance for a few weeks. But it’s not why people in almost every poll disapprove of the bill. It’s because Barack Obama hasn’t communicated well! But as we saw at the health-care summit, Obama is far and away the best communicator in the national Democratic party. If he can’t make the case for this, no one can. The bill is popular in its particulars! Well, it depends on the particulars. If you pull out the popular ones, yes. If you focus on the unpopular ones, no. Newsweek mostly did the former in its poll that seemed to show attitudes toward the bill improved when people learned of its details. But Newsweek didn’t ask about the overall cost, the funding of abortion, the Medicare cuts, the dubious financing, or the likely upward pressure on premiums. Throw those features in, as will naturally happen in the debate over the bill, and it’s unpopular again.

It shouldn’t be difficult for liberals to say the bill is unpopular, but right nonetheless. Some of them do. But most don’t. It may simply pain them too much to acknowledge how uncongenial a center-right country finds their most cherished policy goal.

3) They care about health care so much that they are willing to resort to any maneuver to pass it. Many liberals have portrayed it as practically an everyday occurrence that far-reaching, historic social legislation lacking 60 votes in the Senate is passed through the reconciliation process. This is nonsense. Why not say that an end this important justifies almost any means, and Republicans, in the same position, would probably do the same thing? This would have the ring of truth about it. But such a concession would add another political burden to a bill with plenty of them already. Better to pretend that nothing extraordinary is going on.

When liberals admit these three things, everything will have been said. Until then, pace Obama, the debate is still incomplete.

– Rich Lowry is editor of National Review.

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