This is the more convincing version. After all, Mitch McConnell, now the majority leader in the Senate, said in 2010 that his party’s top priority ought to be seeing that Mr Obama served only a single term. Some Republicans came to believe that defaulting on the country’s debts was a legitimate tool in their campaign against him, kamikaze tactics that presaged the wrecking ball of Trumpism. One speech of Mr Obama’s will be remembered less for what he said than what a listener did: the time, in 2009, when a congressman yelled “You lie!” during a presidential address. “No other president in history has given a speech to Congress and engendered that kind of reaction,” says Mr Axelrod. 

convincing：納得させる
defaulting：債務不履行
legitimate：道理にあった
presaged：前触れとなる
wrecking：建物解体用の鉄球
engendered：引き起こす

Republicans didn’t like the Dodd-Frank financial-regulation bill. They thought Mr Obama antagonistic to business. (Noting record-high share prices and strong corporate earnings, one official jokes wryly that “In our efforts to destroy the stockmarket, we failed miserably.”) Above all, they loathed Obamacare. They loathed it so much that, in 2010, not a single Republican voted for the Affordable Care Act; so much that they have tried more than 60 times to repeal all or some of it; so viscerally that, in 2013, some engineered a partial shutdown of the federal government in a quixotic bid to undo it. Some Republican governors turned down the federal money it made available to expand Medicaid in their states. 

Dodd-Frank：正式題名 金融システムにおける説明責任および透明性を改善することにより合衆国の金融安定を推進するための、「大き過ぎてつぶせない」を終わらせるための、ベイル・アウトを終わらせることによりアメリカの納税者を保護するための、濫用的金融サービス実務から消費者を保護するための、ならびにその他の目的のための法律
antagonistic：対立する
wryly：顔をしかめて
loathed：が大嫌いである
repeal：廃止する
viscerally：根底からの
engineered ：巧みに工作する
quixotic：ドンキホーテ的な
turned：断る

Again, accounts of this reaction diverge. Senator Corker criticises Mr Obama’s timing. The early months of his presidency were, he says, “a hair on fire moment”, at which health reform was a mistaken priority. Mr Obama, he says, brought the Tea Party insurgency in the mid-term election of 2010, and the implacable mood of Congress thereafter, on himself. (Mr Axelrod says waiting would have meant Obamacare never happened: “If it didn’t get done in the first two years, it wouldn’t get done.”) Then there are the flaws and frictions intrinsic to a mash-up of a private health-care market with state subsidies and mandates. In a mildly redistributive system, some premiums are rising; adverse selection has led some insurers to withdraw. 

accounts：話
diverge：分岐する
hair on fire：燃えている
insurgency：反乱 
implacable ：なだめようのない
thereafter：その後
flaws：瑕疵
frictions：軋轢
intrinsic：に固有の
mash-up：ごった煮
mandates：権限
redistributive：再配分する
premiums：保険料
adverse：不利な

Most of these glitches are fixable. None makes Obamacare the un-American, socialist anathema of Republican imaginings. Meanwhile, as Mr Obama often points out, the law provided health insurance for around 20m people who, like Ms Johnson in Chicago, didn’t have it. The proportion of Americans without coverage is now the lowest in history—though many seem fated to lose it again. The ferocious antagonism was less a reasonable critique of an imperfect scheme than a self-interested bid to squish his presidency, gratifying the incandescent Republican base even if doing so harmed the nation. 

glitches：故障・誤動
anathema：ひどく嫌いなもの
imaginings：幻想
ferocious：激烈な
self-interested：利己的な
squish：をつぶす
gratifying：満足させる
incandescent：光り輝く

どうもどっとフランク法案にしろオバマケアにしろ、共和党はオバマに対応するために嫌っていたようだ。トランプがこのオバマケアを廃止しようとひている根底にもこうしたことが影響しているのかもしれない。２００９年の彼の演説では彼が言ったことよりもそれを聞いていた議員の言った「彼は嘘つきだ」と言った言葉の方が記憶に新しいようだ。そうしたことからこの８年間は終始共和党からの支援はまったくなかった。

火曜日。昨日は朝から一日、資料作成。今朝は国際の情勢を英語で勉強する会がある。夜は元三井物産の渡邊さんとの会食。彼は８０歳過ぎても矍鑠としているのはすごい。明日は海野塾で、延々とComfort Womanを行う。これで確か４週目だ。大事なテーマなので、しっかり行なっている。ではまた明日。