polis-jared2By campaigning against a proposed surtax on high-income earners and businesses that would help provide health care to the nation’s growing number of uninsured, Jared Polis, a Democrat from supposedly liberal Boulder, has scored a strange, if not wrath-inducing, victory over President Barack Obama and his party’s leadership.

Polis and other Democratic freshmen who joined him in trying to derail Obama’s health-care overhaul were scolded by the party’s leaders through chiefs of staff yesterday, reports The Hill. The Democrats seem to have a new problem: “Their own rich voters,” writes The Wall Street Journal, noting software mogul Polis’ revolt was not a lonesome one.

While House Speaker Nancy Pelosi appears to have back-pedaled on the surtax, progressive Democrats, like Faiz Shakir, editor of a blog at the Center for American Progress, have not.

“If you dig into the substantive concerns, you find that Polis’ argument is full of holes,” Shakir tells The Denver Post.

Under attack by the left, Polis’ situation provides “a lesson on the complex politics of health care reform and the nervousness of grassroots groups who fear that the reform effort may collapse the way it did under President Bill Clinton,” the Post writes.