NEW YORK After months of hard-edged wrangling in Congress, on the Sunday morning political gab fests, on talk radio, in angry town-hall meetings and in dueling blogs online, the fate of President Obama’s top domestic priority – namely, the overhaul of the nation’s fractured healthcare system and the expansion of health coverage to the uninsured – appeared increasingly threatened. A growing chorus of Beltway insiders and pundits on the left and right were all but declaring health-reform legislation dead in the water for 2009.
