Is Obama to blame for the health-care fiasco?

The unequivocal and hardly unique wording of a NY Daily News headline -- "President Obama's health-care reforms shaky with Democrats, GOP" -- happened to catch my attention yesterday, because with creeping (and rather creepy) frequency the still-minority contents of my inbox announce, with considerable outrage and absolute certainty, the precise opposite: that whatever problems exist within the diminishing prospects of comprehensive reform, they are, at root, a top-down problem. The toppest-down, so to speak.

Obama, these forwarded screeds and accompanying emails proclaim, has sold us out, simple as that. But worse, as noted, is that there seems to be some uptick in this unsourced sentiment. It still lies on the fringe, as best I can tell, but one never knows; some deliriums, like the 9/11 truth movement, possess an infectious virulence.

Why would major news outlets perpetrate such a blatant fallacy -- that Congress, not Obama, is the problem -- at their own expense? Why, that is, would they persist in writing such misleading headlines and stories, rather than highlighting the far more profitable, sensationalistic angle of Obama's assorted and villainous betrayals?

Answer: Because there's no there, there -- there's been no Obamian betrayal. (Not yet, anyway.)

That's not to say that the White House's seemingly sluggish involvement in the health-care issue hasn't given that appearance, but if you will pardon the following FDR comparison at least one more time.

Obama understands, as did Roosevelt, that by and large (and that's an important qualifier, remember that) he can only be as progressive as Congress will permit. This was the running theme in FDR's political and governing philosophy. If you've read any of the less hagiographic, more objective histories of his presidency, then you know he never sentimentally or quixotically launched any legislation or program; he first made reasonably sure -- as sure, anyway, as is possible in the coalition-shifting theatres of politics -- that he had Congress at his back.

In one rare instance in which FDR did, in fact, lose his carefully honed political instincts and plow unadvisedly forward -- that instance being his Court-packing plan -- he got his head handed to him. And recall, too, that when Roosevelt went thrillingly populist in denouncing "economic royalists," that wasn't until the year 1936, and it was because he sensed what we now call an "existential threat" from the populist left, in the personage of one Huey Long.

Obama is a student of history. He knows this stuff. So, like FDR, he is often cautiously progressive, as aware as FDR that he can't just majestically dictate to Congress, where many a self-important fiefdom reigns. I may not care for the too-often consequent languor, and of course Obama doesn't like it, either, and you, no doubt, dislike it as well, but that's the unchangeable reality of it.

In addition, Congressional Democrats aren't the narrow, cohesive ideological body that George W. Bush had in his Republican majorities. Again, like it or not, that's the way things are -- and if FDR and Obama are ever historically linked under one unifying concept even greater than that of like-minded progressivism, it will be that both pragmatically grappled with the political world as it is, not as it should be.

Which brings us back to the health-care debacle, the responsibility for which is being extravagantly and even manically laid, by an infectious few, at Obama's feet. And it's a real puzzler.

Yes, Obama campaigned on a sacred promise of comprehensive health-care reform, but so did the Democratic Party at large. He had little reason to believe that with sizable majorities in both House and Senate -- smack on the heels of a near-revolutionary national campaign that revolved so substantially around a broken health-care system -- a straightforward public option would become so bloodily problematic. True, his expectations were a miscalculation, but their aftermath is no betrayal -- not on Obama's part.

What's more, as Congress indulges in fiscal excuses for its paralysis, it delicately omits that Obama has already suggested a few equitable paths to pay for reform, such as deduction caps on high-income returns, yet they've been soundly rejected -- by Congress.

Furthermore, in withholding the presidential imposition of a plan, Obama believed that he was only avoiding Bill Clinton's magnificent mistake. Let those who will legislate work out the details of our commonly held concepts, he thought, and things will proceed more smoothly; no arrogant, imperial presidency here. Again, an imperfect expectation, yes; a betrayal, no.

If I were to fault the administration in its handling of reform, the fault-finding would lie in its public handling. There is, unquestionably, vigorous pleading and nudging and, by now, some screaming (hello, Rahm) taking place behind congressional curtains, but that three-fourths of the electorate who want comprehensive health-care reform -- now -- also want the president to take a more active, and publicly open, lead.

Because on this issue, an issue of such transcendent intolerability, Obama cannot afford to permit his progressivism to be defined by such an out-of-touch Congress.