Those of you who spent Labor Day weekend blissfully out of range of news coverage will be pleased to learn that Sunday was a good day for the public option -- at least inside the White House.
Robert Gibbs and David Axelrod appeared on on separate Sunday shows (Gibbs on This Week, Axe on Meet the Press), and both reaffirmed the President's support for the public option, calling it a "valuable tool" in keeping costs down and competition up.
Gibbs said that President Obama would make it clear he supports the public option during his speech on Wednesday, although neither he nor Axelrod said whether the president would insist on its inclusion in final legislation.
Here's video excerpts (transcript at DKTV):
Later in the day, Axelrod went further than he had on Meet the Press, telling AP that President Obama expects the public option to be included in whatever health care legislation ends up passing Congress.
The president "believes it should be in the plan, and he expects to be in the plan, and that's our position," Axelrod told The Associated Press.
Asked if that means a public plan has to be in the bill for Obama to sign it, Axelrod responded: "I'm not going to deal in hypotheticals. ... He believes it's important."
Axelrod probably made his comments to the AP to get them to correct their initial reporting, which wrongly claimed that he had backed off the public option on Meet the Press. Perhaps AP based their claim on his body language, which did seem a bit awkward during the interview, but the actual words he used were just as supportive of the public option as Gibbs.
Axelrod also reached out to Politico's Mike Allen to make sure that the AP's inaccurate initial report didn't gain traction, suggesting that the White House has reconsidered its strategy of directly challenging the party base on the public option.
Although Gibbs and Axelrod did express strong support for the public option, they did not elevate it to "must have" status. Nonetheless, compared to comments and leaks coming from the administration over the past few weeks, their comments do signal a shift in the right direction.
On August 15 and 16, President Obama and Secretary Sebelius backed off the public option; on August 20, an anonymous source said "I don't understand why the left of the left has decided that this is their Waterloo."; and on September 2, more anonymous sources told Politico that "administration officials welcome a showdown with liberal lawmakers if they argue they would rather have no health care law than an incremental one."
Sunday was the first major sign that the administration might reverse the course that they've charted since mid-August. They still haven't elevated the public option to the top tier of their health care reform priorities, but at least they don't seem to be distancing themselves from it any more.
It's far from good, but it's still better than before.