James Murray

President Obama has yet to put his signature on the Democrat's historic healthcare bill, but attention is already turning to the administration's other big flagship legislative project – the climate change bill.

Commentators on both sides of America's political divide (should that be chasm?) are even now lining up to suggest that the passage of the fractious 14 months it took to pass the healthcare bill means that the proposed climate change bill is all but dead in the water.

Their argument goes a little something like this: Obama and the Democrat leadership has spent so much political capital on getting healthcare passed that there is none left for dealing with a climate change bill that could prove even more controversial than healthcare reform. That hardly meems possible given the protests on the street that characterised the healthcare debate, but at least most critics of healthcare reforms could accept that the absence of health insurance for millions of people was a problem - many critics of climate change legislation think global warming is a hoax.

Moreover, those Democrats fearful of losing their seats at November's mid term elections have little appetite for a second piece of era defining legislation that threatens to alienate centre-right voters and send them running towards a revitalised Republican Party.

Bloomberg reported this morning that a number of House members are convinced "Obama will likely be forced to scale back energy and climate-change legislation". Similarly, numerous political commentators suggested that having given the president one victory that may cost them their seats so-called moderate Democrats are in no mood to give him another. Meanwhile, Republicans are so incandescent with rage at the way the healthcare bill was forced through that the optimistic hope that the climate change bill could secure bi-partisan support has also gone up in smoke.

There is plenty of validity in this analysis. The chances of climate change legislation passing ahead of November's mid term elections remain thin at best and, if the polls, are right the chances of it passing after the elections are virtually non-existent.

But to suggest, as this analysis does, that the failure to pass healthcare reform would have somehow increased the chances of passing climate change legislation is frankly ridiculous. If healthcare had been defeated, then the chances of any further legislation being passed by the Obama administration would have disappeared completely.

Now an emboldened White House can turn its full attention to the climate change bill, knowing that it has a template for passing controversial legislation in the face of fierce Republican opposition and widespread Democrat scepticism.

Additionally, that legislation is in better shape than many people give it credit for. All of the reports emanating from the trio of Senators - Democrat John Kerry, Republican Lindsey Graham and Independent Joe Lieberman - working on the bill suggest it will contain numerous compromises capable of winning over the business lobby, not to mention moderate Democrats and perhaps even a few Republicans.

The details that have emerged so far suggest that while the legislation will not go far enough for many environmentalists it has learnt from many of the mistakes made in the EU emissions trading scheme and incorporated coherent responses to almost all of the concerns Senators' raised over the first version of the bill.

With Graham and Lieberman having invested so much of their political reputation in crafting a bi-partisan response to a climate change threat they genuinely believe poses an existential threat to the global economy, Obama may even get that bi-partisan backing he has craved, albeit in small numbers. It is also worth noting that there are enormous similarities between the draft bill currently being crafted and that put forward on the campaign trail by Republican presidential nominee John McCain.

Unfortunately, both the odds and the clock are still against the legislation passing. The most likely outcome is a painful repeat of the Healthcare Bill with recalcitrant self-serving Democrats demanding ever more compromises to pass legislation that should be in line with their political DNA. If they stall for long enough and the Democrats do suffer losses in the mid term elections the bill will be consigned to the vaults of history.

But, with the draft bill due to be presented within the next couple of weeks, it is undoubtedly in a better position now than it was 24 hours ago, and given Obama's well-documented ability to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat it is not dead yet – not by a long chalk.