Affixing blame on health care: Republicans, Obama, or the Democratic Congress?

Maybe you work in sales, and you'd like to learn how to gracefully deny your product's undeniable deficiencies; or perhaps you're about to testify in court, under oath, and you're not sure how to tell the truth without telling the uncomfortable truth; or it could be that you're conducting a Sanfordlike affair, although probably a trifle closer to home, and you wish to reserve the futuristic option of saying you never really, actually, absolutely lied about it ...

Whatever the case may be, whatever your furtive need, I give you, from Sunday's "Meet the Press," with guest David Axelrod, the Platonic Ideal of rhetorical evasion, from which you can surely profit in your personal life.

Host David Gregory began by committing a rookie mistake, that being, hurling a question infused with a dependent clause: "Do you think the president will get a healthcare reform bill that includes a public plan this year?" Now, even a James Inhofe could have fielded that one with aplomb, which Axelrod promptly did: "I think we're going to get a healthcare reform bill this year."

What Axelrod's non-answer answer did signal, however, was a thundering Bullshit Alert. Yet Gregory failed to pick up on its clamorous reverberations: "But you're confident about getting that bill with a public plan this year."

Of course he is, Mr. Gregory, and he's even willing to venture that he "think[s] a public choice will be part of it." Note: in every nonetheless beautifully formulated lie there exists an inescapable imperfection -- I think I'll be home by 10 -- and Axelrod's was precisely that transitive construction, which edged Gregory into the role of inquisitive, suspicious spouse: "Well, let's be clear what we're talking about.... You're talking about a public sponsored, a government sponsored healthcare plan...."

"Look, we believe strongly in a public choice," said Axelrod -- a brilliant riposte, lathered in virtue, innocence and indignation.

Gregory, however, at long last smelled blood, a sensory reaction that finally triggered the journalistic animal instinct that should have initiated this chase: "When it comes to a public plan, though [finally, no more dependent phrasing], no ultimatums from the president?" -- after which Axelrod sashayed, "Well, the president believes strongly ... in a public choice, and he's made that very, very clear."

The host pressed virtually the same question in no less than four subsequent pursuits; in individual responses to which Axelrod heaved the same, ineffable coyness of a nineteenth-century diplomat: "We have gotten a long way down the road by not drawing bright lines in the sand ... He won't sign a bill that doesn't meet [his] priorities ... The president wants a robust public option to compete against these private plans" and, ultimately, back to the summer beach, with "We've not gotten as far as we've gotten by drawing bright lines in the sand. He's going to fight hard for that."

The not terribly difficult translation, of course, is that a public option is almost doubtlessly doomed. Axelrod knows it, Rahm Emanuel knows it, you and I both know it, and with an assurance approaching John McLaughlin's metaphysical certainty, President Obama knows it.

There remains but the matter of blame. And here, universal uncertainty, as evidenced by the three, disparate cottage industries of absolute certainty, reign -- two-thirds of which have me pinned to the wall of supreme bafflement.

One camp -- the diehard, my party never errs, Democratic partisan camp -- remains pathetically tethered to blaming Congressional Republicans, an internally brawling, politically scattered, numerically insignificant, risibly impotent bunch if there ever was one. As is true with all congressional minorities, whatever power Republicans have retained has been granted by the majority. So they're not -- they can't be -- the problem. They're amusing, they're prickly, they're noisome, and no doubt they make good copy, and I don't know how I'd live without them, but they're not the problem.

Another camp -- and this is the one that baffles me most -- has determined it's all Barack Obama's fault, as if any president can simply wave a pretty, powerful wand of automatic genuflection-decree. Their argumentation motives are sometimes mysterious but their reasoning is always simplistic, if not prodigiously contradictory: Imperial Bush bad, Imperial Obama good.

This is not to say that I've been bowled over, to date, by Obama's public advocacy of a public option; but it does suggest that Obama knows what all of his political advisers know -- that his administration's agenda cannot politically afford the early humiliation of that smoothed sand being kicked in his face, and that he still has three and a half to seven and a half years of delicately suffering ...

... the real problem: Congressional Democrats, also internally brawling and politically scattered, as well as numerically insignificant and risibly impotent when it comes to unified competence.

Which brings me back to "MTP" and host David Gregory, who foreshadowed, in the words of Howard Dean, the inexorable path of destruction on which the Democratic Party is navigating: "We voted for change a few months ago. We expect change. And if we don't get it, there's going to be more change. Success on healthcare reform is a must for Democrats. I think it's going to be a catastrophic problem for the Democratic Party if they can't get this [public option] bill out."

Failing that, redemption by 2010 is out of the question -- because this is not one of those issues about which they know not what they do.