On Again, Off Again

Friday and Saturday we had news that the White House was behind the public option and had finally weighed in supporting Dems in the House and Senate to get the plan to his desk.

Today however HuffPo is reporting that Obama is now trying to stop the public option in Congress and he's pushing for the Snowe Queen's trigger plan.

"The leadership understands that pushing for a public option is a somewhat risky strategy, but we may be within striking distance. A signal from the president could be enough to put us over the top," said one Senate Democratic leadership aide. Such pleading is exceedingly rare on Capitol Hill and comes only after Senate leaders exhausted every effort to encourage Obama to engage.

"Everybody knows we're close enough that these guys could be rolled. They just don't want to do it because it makes the politics harder," said a senior Democratic source, saying that Obama is worried about the political fate of Blue Dogs and conservative Senate Democrats if the bill isn't seen as bipartisan. "These last couple folks, they could get them if Obama leaned on them."

But with fundamental reform of the health care system in plain sight for the first time in half a century, the president appears to be siding with those who see the Senate and its entrenched culture as too resistant to change. Administration officials say that Obama's preference for the trigger, which is backed by Maine Republican Sen. Olympia Snowe, is founded in a fear that Reid's public option couldn't get the 60 votes needed to overcome a GOP filibuster. More specifically, aides fear that a handful of conservative Democrats will not support a bill unless it has at least one Republican member's support.

The president's retreat leaves Reid as the champion of progressive reform -- an irony that is not lost on those who have long derided the Majority Leader as too cautious.

"Who knew that when it came down to crunch time, Harry Reid would be the one who stepped up to the plate and Barack Obama would shy away from the fight," emailed one progressive strategist.

HuffPo's usually better than this, but it's clear that there's a long way to go in this fight still, and that the President's current level of support is not good enough for some.

We've seen this before. Bob Cesca has some good advice:

Over the last several months it's almost become a regular feature of the news, like weather reports and stock market updates. Every week, stories about how the public option isn't going to happen, or how the White House is telling the House progressives to STFU about it. We've seen numerous stories about alleged White House support for co-ops or triggers or nothing at all. And every time, there's a wild kneejerk spaz attack about it.

The fact remains that the only named source in the piece is Dan Pfeiffer who insists that the whole trigger/Snowe story "is false." Now any quote should be taken with a grain of skepticism, but in relative terms, it's a good rule of thumb to take a named quote more seriously than an unnamed one.

Agreed. Every news cycle it's how the public option is doomed...when it refuses to die and a majority of Americans still want it. The always reliable BooMan with some much needed perspective:

Let me tell you something. If Harry Reid went up to the White House with a plan to pass a public option and the president did not like the plan, you never would have heard about it. Reid never would have taken the step to float putting the public option in the base bill if he didn't already have a green light from the White House. The truth is that the administration never believed they could pass a public option through the Senate on the first pass. That was what Obama was telling us on that conference call back in July. But things changed when Kirk replaced Kennedy and Byrd regained his health. We have 60 senators now, and if Reid thinks he can get 60 votes for cloture that changes the plan.

In the end, we have to trust somebody. It's a representative democracy, after all.