NYT:
WASHINGTON — Given hardening Republican opposition to Congressional health care proposals, Democrats now say they see little chance of the minority’s cooperation in approving any overhaul, and are increasingly focused on drawing support for a final plan from within their own ranks.
Top Democrats said Tuesday that their go-it-alone view was being shaped by what they saw as Republicans’ purposely strident tone against health care legislation during this month’s Congressional recess, as well as remarks by leading Republicans that current proposals were flawed beyond repair.
Last night, CNN's Ed Henry and Dana Bash offered a similar report, saying that White House sources tell them Democrats and the Obama Administration will push health care reform through the Senate without Republican support unless a deal -- an increasingly remote possibility -- is reached by mid-September.
And Politico is also reporting the same basic story:
The aides call it more a prediction than a strategy shift, and blame the GOP.
"We were forced into this by Republicans," one official said.
The administration is pointing to increasingly partisan comments by the top Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, Charles Grassley of Iowa, who said while home for summer recess: "I’m not walking away from the table. I’m being pushed away from the table."
Meanwhile, the Washington Post reports the administration was caught off-guard by the intensity of support for the public option among progressives:
President Obama's advisers acknowledged Tuesday that they were unprepared for the intraparty rift that occurred over the fate of a proposed public health insurance program, a firestorm that has left the White House searching for a way to reclaim the initiative on the president's top legislative priority.
Administration officials insisted that they have not shied away from their support for a public option to compete with private insurance companies, an idea they said Obama still prefers to see in a final bill.
But at a time when the president had hoped to be selling middle-class voters on how insurance reforms would benefit them, the White House instead finds itself mired in a Democratic Party feud over an issue it never intended to spotlight.
"I don't understand why the left of the left has decided that this is their Waterloo," said a senior White House adviser, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "We've gotten to this point where health care on the left is determined by the breadth of the public option. I don't understand how that has become the measure of whether what we achieve is health-care reform."
It's somewhat amusing that so-called political experts would be surprised by the reaction to efforts over the weekend to jettison the political option. A public option is a top progressive goal, and given that it is itself a compromise, it's not one progressives are willing to deal away.
As long as the public option was included in health care reform, progressives would be happy to focus on other messages that might help sell other parts of the bill to a broader public. However, by hinting that it was prepared to toss the public option aside, the administration forced progressives to redouble their focus on the public option for fear of losing it in a misguided deal with Republicans.
It is that simple, it was entirely predictable, and the fix is straightforward: continue supporting the public option. The current round of "go it alone" news stories are a signal that the White House will follow that path, and if they are prepared to back up that signal with action, then they are back on track.
However, if this latest round of stories is just a delaying tactic in the hopes that the progressive 'rabble' will blow off steam and fold when September rolls around, then it will prove to be a major miscalculation.
Let's hope it is the former. If so, then it's more important than ever to support not just progressive Democrats who are standing firm on the public option but also the White House in its efforts to sell the bill to the broader public.
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Join the discussion in recommended diaries by Maimonides ("Rahm to GOP: It's War"), Renee (""Left of the left" Caught Obama by Surprise"), and Drdemocrat ("BREAKING: CNN reporting Dems going it ALONE on health care!").
