"They won the election" -- Judd Gregg, man of no mystery

There have been two encouraging developments on the health-care front this week, although one began, just to understate things, dispiritingly.

I don't know what FDA-uncontrolled substance White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel had been smoking before sitting down for a Monday interview with the Wall Street Journal, or, possibly, what hope of a trial balloon he envisioned soaring across this neglected land, nevertheless he surrenderingly ventured that the Obama administration just might entertain the idea of a public-optionless health-reform bill.

"[A] mechanism to keep the private insurers honest": that, as Emanuel put it, is the only "non-negotiable ... goal" -- the "path" there isn't. He went on, for instance, to tenuously embrace the comprehensive-reform-killing idea of a public-option "trigger," which of course would only permit private insurers another couple decades to deny or bamboozle sick, desperate consumers.

I rarely find intellectual harmony with the WSJ editorial board, but this morning, I thought, those happy libertarians captured the essential fallout of Emanuel's whimsical gaffe with a perfectly concise flourish: "Progressives went bonkers."

You got that right, boys, because as you also noted with seething accuracy, progressives are "adamant about a public option ... because they know it is an opening wedge for the government to dominate U.S. health care."

Naturally, for WSJ-editorial-page readers this was meant to invite an unthinking chorus of Boos. Yet could it be that progressives aren't so much nefariously big-government-happy as they are, simply, fiscally and humanitarianly confident that a singular, not-for-profit insurance pool of 300 million is a better guarantee of America's health than green-eyeshaded profiteers?

But I digress. Back to the off-the-reservation, floated musings of Rahm Emanuel, who soon found himself being corrected by the embarrassed but much weightier chief of all staff: "I am pleased," read a presidential statement from the health-insured regions of Eurasia, "by the progress we're making on healthcare reform and still believe, as I've said before, [Rahm], that one of the best ways to bring down costs, provide more choices, and assure quality is a public option that will force the insurance companies to compete and keep them honest."

In speeches, President Obama likes to introduce fundamental concepts with the attention-grabbing phrase, "Let me be clear." And now, Mr. President, let us -- not just progressives, but tens of millions of the manifold ideologically striped -- be clear:

If a clean public option actually is on the bargaining table, as far as White House negotiators are concerned, and if the legislative absence of one is anything but a veto-promised death warrant, and if you're just being clever and coy about your dispassionate pursuit of one, and if, at the end of the negotiating day, you cave on your insistence of one, then you might as well pull an abortive Palin-resignation and go home, because your presidency would, effectively, be over.

Got that? This is your employer talking, Mr. President.

At any rate, for now we can only trust that he's doing his job, as promised -- and his public slapdown of his chief of staff was encouraging.

Which brings us to the second encouraging development of the week: another slapdown, in this instance, that of Majority Leader Harry Reid's -- "In a sign of a deepening rift among Senate Democrats," as the New York Times reported what I greeted as hopeful news of, finally, a little sand-line drawing -- public woodshedding of that Grassley-kissing, reform-stalling, bribe-collecting Max Baucus.

"Aides said Mr. Reid," said the Times in turn, "speaking for other Senate Democratic leaders, was concerned that Mr. Baucus had not included any provision for a government-run insurance program to compete with private insurers" -- "concerned" being Capitol Hill doublespeak for "get off your ass, Max."

Delightful as it was that mild-mannered Harry saw fit -- although, characteristically, through aides -- to publicly chastise the finance committee chairman, of even greater delight was that splendidly telling passage, "speaking for other Senate Democratic leaders."

That's a sign, however creaky, however slight, however retractable, that they've just about had enough of bipartisan insuperabilities.

Ironically, it took a Republican senator -- Judd Gregg -- to distill these detectable permutations with forthright and commonsensical clarity: "They've got 60 votes. They won the election. It appears they've decided maybe to go this alone."