RALEIGH — Sometimes aggressive rulers bite off more than they can chew.

History gives us many such examples. One of them was Napoleon’s decision to invade Spain in 1808 and put his elder brother Joseph on the throne. That was the first great miscalculation of his career.

Could it be that Obama’s decision to “reform” American health care by thoroughly politicizing it will become his Spain — a short-run victory that will in the long run prove disastrous for him?

In 1808, Napoleon was the master of continental Europe.. The Spanish army was no match for the French, and Napoleon was certain he could easily crush it, capture Madrid, and send the corrupt King Charles IV packing. Under the conventions of warfare at that time, once you had beaten the enemy army and taken the capital city, fighting ceased and the victor could enjoy the spoils of war. Napoleon, the great conqueror, couldn’t resist this piece of low-hanging fruit.

Things did not go according to Napoleon’s plans. Defeating the Spanish army was easy enough, as was the business of putting Joseph on the throne. But afterward, the country erupted in partisan warfare that gave us the word “guerrilla.” French garrisons and supply trains were attacked. Spain was drenched in blood, and the drain on French resources and manpower was debilitating. For Napoleon, conquering Spain was a self-inflicted wound that turned gangrenous.

In early 2009, Barack Obama was in much the same position as Napoleon in 1808. He sat in the White House, expecting to use overwhelming Democratic power in Congress to enact his initiatives for remaking the United States to suit his nanny-state dreams. Obama and his Democratic shock troops captured the auto and financial industries in blitzkrieg campaigns in the spring. He seemed invincible — and then he decided to launch a summer offensive to take over health care. The battle over that has raged on and on.

Exactly what will happen on this front is uncertain, but let’s assume that in the fall, Obama’s forces, reinforced, re-energized, and inspired by the loss of Field Marshal Kennedy, ram through some variant of ObamaCare. Then they will be able to savor their victory — right?

I suspect not. Here’s why I think such a victory will be like Napoleon’s “victory” in Spain.

In the past, every advance of the welfare state has been politically successful (and by that, I certainly don’t mean they were good policies) for this reason: government programs delivered concentrated, visible benefits to people while the costs were widely dispersed among taxpayers and consumers.

Social Security, for example, has been a political success because the benefits are tangible and well-publicized, creating a strong political constituency for continuing and expanding it. Social Security taxes are cleverly hidden by the device of withholding. Grandma Green sees her check, but the working people who were taxed to pay for it never saw their money.

That’s why Social Security has been a political sacred cow. Economists and policy wonks have been criticizing it for decades, but to no avail.

As “public choice” economists have long understood, even terribly inefficient and wasteful government programs will survive if they have concentrated benefits and widely diffuse costs. The list of programs like that is enormous: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Food Stamps, sugar price supports, export subsidies, protective tariffs, pro-union legislation, ethanol subsidies, federal housing programs, and many more.

Now think about ObamaCare. It’s different from all those welfare-state policies in a crucial respect — it will create concentrated, visible costs for people, but the benefits will mostly be intangible and diffused. That isn’t a politically successful model. Instead, it’s likely to create a national uprising, just as Napoleon’s invasion of Spain did.

ObamaCare is an attempt to provide expansive health care benefits for millions of people who previously made do with much less, while simultaneously bringing down total health care spending. That will inevitably lead to the kinds of denial-of-treatment decisions and rationing by waiting list that are found in Britain and other countries with heavily politicized systems. Americans won’t react with indifference when grandma can’t get a hip replacement because some federal panel has decreed that it wouldn’t be cost-effective. Never before has a government program here created large numbers of people who will see themselves as terribly victimized by it.

Concentrated cost versus an abstract benefit. That defense won’t play in Peoria. It probably won’t even play in San Francisco, Boston, or Washington, D.C.

Could ObamaCare actually be driven out, as the French were from Spain? Combined with the outrages that other aspects of Obama’s statist, authoritarian agenda will keep producing, the United States is going to experience the political equivalent of the Spanish uprising against Napoleon.

George Leef is director of research at the John W. Pope Center for Higher Education Policy (popecenter.org).