The Senate moved forward on the $848 billion health-care bill this weekend. It wasn’t thanks to its chief cheerleader, Barack Obama, but in spite of him.

What a mess he’s made of the politics here.

He’s alienated both influential abortion-rights diva Kate Michelman on the left, and wacky Republican Congresswoman Michele Bachmann on the right. “We don’t know how far the government will go in this bureaucracy!” Bachmann said last week about a quasi-government panel’s new mammogram recommendations.

In the middle are American women thoroughly confused about those mammogram guidelines, the new Pap test guidelines, and whether their kids will ever get that elusive, Obama-promised swine flu vaccine - or spend the winter Purelling their palms into dried-up...