I would just like to piggyback on Michael Barone’s earlier analysis of the Dodd financial reform bill. There’s a line of common wisdom that Republicans, having shown a bend-don’t-break opposition to health care reform, would be pushing it too far to unite against the next item on President Obama’s agenda: reform of the nation’s financial regulations.

There is merit to this argument. Moreover, many of the worst aspects of the financial reform bill from the business perspective (such as “plain vanilla”) have been removed. The problem on Wall Street is real, and the public is aware of this, so resistance to reform might seem like resistance to needed change.