Sayeth the good doctor:
"If I were a member of the U.S Senate I wouldn't vote for the [Senate Finance Committee] bill but I would vote for this [opt-out]," Dean said, "not because it is necessarily the right thing to do but because it gets us to a better conversation about what we need to do." [...]
[I]n a wholly political context, he acknowledged, adding the opt-out option to the bill might be the best and only way to get something through the Senate.
"I would like to see that come out of the Senate because it is a real public plan," he said of the opt-out compromise. "Then they can negotiate it [with the House] in conference committee... And if this passes I won't say it is not reform because it is reform.... If this is what it takes to get 60 votes I say go for it."
Why the leader of "the Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party" is right below the fold....
In his post on the subject, Steve Benen of the Washington Monthly makes a very astute observation:
I can't help but wonder exactly how many states would go through with the opt-out. When the stimulus debate was underway, plenty of right-wing governors said they had no intention of accepting the recovery funds. They changed their minds when partisan spite was overwhelmed by policy necessity.
The same could happen here, especially given the national popularity of the public option. It's even easier to imagine some states opting out, and then opting back in when they see other states benefiting from the public-private competition.
I think his analogy to the stimulus package gets this exactly right. Once it passed, Republican politicians who opposed the stimulus not only accepted the cash but took credit for it coming to their districts and even begged for more. Few if any Governors or State Legislatures will turn down the public plan and those who do will quickly pay a high political price for doing so. Very soon Republicans will become "defenders" of the public option the way they became defenders of Medicare during the current, ridiculous health care "debate."
This is a win-win for health reform and for progressive Democrats: Republicans who try to block the public option in their states will become endangered and those who don't (which will be most if not all) will be revealed as the hypocrites they are.