A New Week, A New Plan

I don't buy at all the efforts to walk back yesterday's multiple efforts by the White House to say the public option is optional, if not completely dead. Barry Schwartz at PERRspectives nails it:

The signs of President Obama's seeming walk-back of one of the pillars of his health care overhaul are multiplying. His Sunday New York Times op-ed fails to mention "public option," referring only to "a choice of high-quality, affordable coverage" and "quality, affordable options once we pass reform." That glaring omission followed his declaration at a Colorado town hall meeting yesterday:

"The public option - whether we have it or we don't have it - is not the entirety of health care reform. This is just one sliver of it, one aspect of it. And, by the way, it's both the right and the left that have become so fixated on this that they forget everything else."

For her part, Sebelius suggested the White House would yield to public option opponents on either side of the aisle, including key Senate Democrat Kent Conrad. So-called health insurance co-ops, which many doubt will result in either affordable insurance premiums or slow rising medical costs, could instead be an ingredient. As she told CNN's John King, "what's important is choice and competition," adding that, a public option "is not an essential element."

Unfortunately, we've been here before. As the concessions to obstructionist Republicans over the watered-down economic recovery package showed, appeasement is futile.

Absolutely. If the Democrats can pass a health care reform plan, they keep their majority. If they don't, 2010 and 2012 will not be kind to them. Democrats elected this majority and this President on the knowledge that it would take a significant margin to get real legislation passed, and yet the Republicans still effectively control the Senate through the filibuster and Democratic defectors. That's Harry Reid's fault.

The Republicans will never allow a health-care reform bill to be passed, period. If it does, they're dead as a party for twenty, thirty years. There isn't a single Republican who will do it. The GOP political machine would instantly disown them and primary them out of Washington. Do not count on a single Republican vote on the issue as long as Obama is President.

Following up on his post last night, Nate Silver charts the likely course forward:

If the White House now says that Kathleen Sebelius "misspoke" in her statements on CNN this morning, they still have a lot of explaining to do. Did Barack Obama, Robert Gibbs, Bill Clinton, and Dick Durbin also misspeak when they hinted that it was time to move past the public option? Did they not know that they'd generate headlines like this one on the Drudge Report, headines that would take a lot of wind out of the public option's sails?

The White House had to know these things. This has not been a subtle hint. If they're hedging a bit now, it's probably because they're hoping to temper the reaction some in the blogopshere. I don't blame them for wanting to do so. And I don't blame the blogosphere for being angry -- the White House did not provide much in the way of leadership on this issue. But that doesn't mean it isn't the right time for the White House to (at least mostly) cut bait. There's likely going to have to be some sort of "regrouping" moment in September for health care to pass -- some sense of momentum that the White House can sustain for two, three, four weeks. If you'd waited until then to table the public option, such a moment would be less likely. There also probably has to be some effort to sell the public on the virtues of the plan as is -- and if the Administration can't convince the liberal blogopshere of that over the next 2-4 weeks, they almost certainly can't hope to do so to the general public.

The battle now is to rally the Democratic base, which has been badly demoralized. Can Obama do it? He's certainly capable. Will he? I'm not at all sure. The alternative? Get a bill on the floor with 55 votes or so and force the Republicans to filibuster it, then make that the issue of 2010.

What about this?,” Carville said Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union, “Suppose they pass a House bill that can get 56 Senate Democrats.” Then, Carville suggested, instead of using reconciliation, a special budgetary maneuver in Senate procedure that frustrate GOP attempts to mount a filibuster, Democrats should call for a vote. “And make [Republicans] filibuster it. But the old kinda way is that they filibuster it and make’em go three weeks and all night and [Democrats] will be there the whole time.

“Then, you say, ‘They’re the people that stopped it. We had a majority of Democrats. We had a good bill. They stopped it.’"

The problem with that of course is that was the plan in 1994. It failed rather spectacularly.

We'll see how this version goes on the Democratic side, but the Republican playbook was written 16 years ago, updated for the internet age, and is in full effect. And so far, it's working.