[Candidates] Obama and Clinton had differed mainly over the issue of a mandate. Clinton said a mandate was needed to make the plan affordable (in the budgetary sense) and Obama said he couldn't see how a mandate would be fair to the buyer if it wasn't affordable (in a premium sense)….
[B]efore Obama took office he started canvassing the Senate to see what kind of support there was for his health care plan. He quickly discovered that there was no Republican support [and] also [that] the Democratic caucus… were more favorably disposed to Clinton's mandate than his own plan, and there were [even] a few Dems who opposed the public option [and hence] that he probably wouldn't have 60 Democratic votes in the caucus…
To get the bill he ran on, he was going to have to make sure that the public option passed on the House side and, since it could not pass on the Senate side, that it be included in the Conference Report…. If the Dems didn't have 60 votes, the Republicans would filibuster and take the blame for obstruction, setting up the argument for using reconciliation… [or, s]eeing the momentum for health care reform, one or two Republicans would vote for cloture and the bill would pass… If the Dems did have 60 votes, they could muscle the few doubters to vote for cloture, even if they opposed the underlying bill.
The Democrats are in good position. Sen. Byrd… misses most votes, but Franken is now a senator, Kennedy has been replaced, and Specter is a Democrat. If the Dems stay united on cloture, the bill can pass with a public option and without using budget reconciliation. Yet, Obama can't say that because we are still in the stage of passing something through the Finance Committee. We're still in the stage… where we need to line up all sixty Democrats in favor of cloture. That means… [t]he administration cannot afford to alienate anyone. If, at any point, the administration had taken the position that the public option absolutely must be in any bill that Obama signs, then the bill would never have passed through the Finance Committee. And that would have put the blame for failure on the Democrats…
So, what we've been witnessing has been a careful dance. What people say is different from what they mean.
This seems about right to me in most of the particulars, and I hope I can be forgiven for such an over-ample over-sampling.
It will depress me unutterably to be told yet again that this kind of elementary strategizing represents "nth-dimensional chess," especially when we observed this sort of head-counting and foresight and patient strategizing throughout the Presidential campaign and subsequently on both budgetary and foreign policy fronts over the last year. Actually co-opting the opposition and divide and conquer strategies aren't exactly rocket science. A generation of mostly Republican dumb-dumbs in the White House seems to have suffused the blogosphere with the bigotry of low expectations where Presidential intelligence is concerned.
I do think, as it happens, that progressive left unity -- made possibly largely through the work of online educators, agitators, and organizers like Jane Hamsher and a few indispensable voices in the more mainstream media like Rachel Maddow and Michael Moore -- has created the necessary pressures and fertile discursive terrain without which such Obama strategizing would have likely foundered and cashed out in outcomes far worse than what we are going to get instead. Insisting that Obama's conduct is perfectly intelligible as left wing of the possible pragmatism from a center-left President (on whose far left you will find me) is not my way of inviting progressive complacency. I just see little point in the ready capitulation to despair inspired by gloom-and-doom "Obama is a stealth corporatist little better than Republicans" purist jibber-jabber, especially when such radicalism is innervating rather than energizing at a time when we have a President who can and must be "made to do it" where progressive outcomes are concerned.
By the way, I also agree with Booman that Krugman's campaign season favoritism toward HRC over Obama sometimes got a wee bit snot-nosed, but I don't care, I still adore him.
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