Power Of The Pres

by digby

I don’t know if this is true, but it is good for us for headlines like this to be out there:

Health care reform: Privately, Barack Obama strongly backs public option

Despite months of seeming ambivalence about creating a government health insurance plan, the Obama White House has launched an intensifying behind-the-scenes campaign to get divided Senate Democrats to take up some version of the idea in the weeks just ahead.

I don’t care if the president puts his “prestige” on the line by lobbying for the Olympics and not getting it and I doubt anyone else cares about that either. But if he puts his prestige on the line for a public option and doesn’t get it, he’s got a huge problem because not only will his base be disappointed, the political establishment will see him as a loser who can’t get his own party together. That’s just too much power for him to lose at one time.

Obviously, we have no idea what kind of public option they are going to settle on, and it may very well be a public option in name only. But if this story is true, the Democrats have been persuaded that the public option is not the electoral kiss of death they and every villager assumed it would be after the Town Hall circus. The polls are holding up, the base is adamant about including it and it’s looking like the smart way to make the case for cost control (which is what it’s intended to do in the first place.)

The Republicans refusing to play ball is what did this and we should thank them for it. By taking themselves out of the game they forced Obama to deal only with his own party and that makes it a test of his partisan leadership. That’s a test he can’t afford to fail. One of the consequences of having a big majority is that you have no excuses not to lead. He can’t blame it on Republicans, they’ve vacated the field and once it becomes a purely partisan matter, woe to those who treat their base like doormats.

Just two weeks ago you couldn’t find even one fatuous gasbag who would bet a nickel that the public option was even worth talking about. They were rolling their eyes and sighing like sullen valley girls every time the issue came up. At the very least, this should prove that they are totally useless as prognosticators (not that we needed any more proof…). They simply can’t understand that actual humans are out here in the country have a say in all this. They just assumed that since a bunch of teabaggers were speaking in tongues and rending their garments that it meant Real America was up in arms and the Democrats couldn’t possibly offend them. After all, they were mostly middle aged and older white Republicans, just like the Village, which represents God, mother and apple pie. They were wrong.

(It also shows that legislative sausage making, like all negotiations, doesn’t go by a script but is rather an evolving, fluid interaction and exchange. You can’t always map it out no matter how good you are at reading poker faces. You have to keep your own goals in mind and analyze the state of play from day to day.)

As I said, I have no idea if this public option they may finally come up with will be worth a damn. We’ll have to see what develops. But as Mike Lux pointed out in an email, “I’d rather be talking about what kind of public option to have than not talking about one at all.”

Howard Dean said it in this appearance with Nancy Snyderman back on September 18th:

Snyderman: Why are you so sure that a public option will come to fruition?

Dean: Because it’s the only thing that works.

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