Will it be a Democratic civil war?

"If there's a way, we'll find it!" is the audio logo of one of those Medicare-financed electric scooter companies which advertises relentlessly on cable news to the infirm elderly. Yet every time I hear it, I think not of nifty little motorized wheelchairs but of the Democratic Party and its working logo, If there's a way to screw it up, we'll find it!

After roughly 100 years of debate and our lagging behind every other industrialized country, it was such a simple, straightforward objective: affordable health care for all. For sure, proposed funding mechanisms wouldn't be simple, nor would the public-private bureaucratic transition to universality, but the objective itself couldn't be less debatable. Right?

Wrong. The voices of the broken yet immensely expensive status quo have managed in their propagandistic genius to portray even moderate health-care reform as a thoughtless rush to unnecessary social upheaval, thereby resettling national opinion along the old left-right lines of polarization which, at least on the matter of health-care reform, had recently, virtually disappeared.

Still, the Democratic Party was ill content to leave it at that.

True, the party began as the 800-pound politico in this contest -- possessing the White House, controlling both houses of Congress, towering over the scattered remnants of the dyspeptically stunned GOP, and starting with a tremendous advantage in pro-reform public opinion.

But merely losing control of the debate and sliding back into Bush-era polarization wasn't SNAFU-satisfactory enough for the briefly -- very briefly -- mighty party of change. No, it decided, like the atomized clusterfucking organization it is, to subdivide the national brawl: to pit, that is, Democrat against Democrat, party centrist against party liberal, even the left against the left.

All, merely, over the moderate reform of a public option. Reported the Politico Saturday, in a striking non-newsy way: "[L]eading Democrats are warning that the party likely will have to accept major compromises to get a bill passed this year -- perhaps even dropping a proposal to create a government-run plan." Well, there's a shock; I think the publication meant to report that leading Democrats are increasingly warning of major compromises, since we've all been smelling the matutinal napalm of political cowardice for, what is it now ... months?

I hasten to qualify, as did the Politico, tepidly, that the white flag has yet to be hoisted: "There is no guarantee ... that progressive House and Senate members [won't] make good on their promise to oppose a bill without a public insurance plan" -- this rowdy, schoolyard recess of August will indeed come to a merciful end, and thereupon lawmakers will return to the real work of fashioning coalitions and a final bill.

On numerous occasions I have heard former party chairman Howard Dean predict, with a casual dismissiveness, that a public option will remain intact, no question about it. His stiff-upper-lip confidence is admirable, if not a trifle studied; his assurances, however, are being muffled by those metronomic "rumblings of what could devolve into a Democratic civil war."

To some extent, Democrats are already there: Somewhat secessionist, 1861-like conventions are being held, such as last week's Netroots Nation gathering, at which former President Bill Clinton literally "pleaded" with attendees to "try to keep this thing in the lane of getting something done. We need to pass a bill and move this thing forward ... [and] be mindful we may need to take less than a full loaf," meaning, of course, the slicing off of a public option.

The odds that the former president's comments went unvetted by the White House and "leading Democrats" are somewhere below non-existent, indicating that Democratic-caucus headcounts in the pro-public option column are faring poorly. But how did attending progressives greet Clinton's cautionary tale? A straw poll was fascinating: only "53 percent ... said they cannot support a health care reform bill that does not include a public option."

A plurality indeed, but by the near-slimmest of margins. I would have predicted a lopsided, non-compromising outcome from this resolutely progressive group, certainly not a virtual 50-50 division in opinion. And there you have it; the potential for a skirmishing civil war within the broader civil war: progressives against progressives as a side action among rank-and-file Democrats fighting rank-and-file Democrats -- all of whose party "leaders" have found a way to screw this thing up.

From a clean, sociopolitically pragmatic point of view, I find myself uncomfortably siding with Bill Clinton and the 47 percent, since it's impossible not to sympathize with the frustration and even intransigence of the slim majority. Yet progress is always incremental (someday, we will get to single-payer) and to deny the already insured the statutory protection of, say, guaranteed policy renewal or no gender discrimination or fully covered preventive care seems, so to speak, nationally masochistic, or schoolmarmishly cruel.

And that's only half the political pragmatism. The other half is the warding off of a complete right-wing victory in its total war against any measures of sensible, primordial health-care reform.

But, happily, Democrats have a long way to go -- probably October -- before the rumblings of civil war ignite, perhaps, into an internal Armageddon.