White House desperation, yes; but scapegoating Obama?

In this abruptly shifting, insanely baffling, almost comically farraginous goo of national debate over health-care reform, one constant, other than the far right's Beretta-packing love of authoritarian anarchy, has emerged with clarity: the White House's political desperation.

The Obama administration is so grimly haunted by the ghost of the miscalculating Clinton administration -- which, you may recall, began by digging its righteous spurs firmly into a Democratic Congress' side and then found itself having to collaborate for six years with an emboldened, amplified enemy -- that it's willing to bargain nearly anytime, anywhere, with anyone, just to move things along for a successful presidency's sake.

Battered history has left it no choice. Hence the desperation; hence the whirlwinded downshifting and braking and careening of the last 72 hours.

Sunday was the worst; Sunday was a desperate train wreck. There, on one of the morning chat shows, sat Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, grasping her all too obvious trial balloon of a public option as a "non-essential," while elsewhere, senior adviser David Axelrod was droning (my, how that man can drone) about the president's belief in a public plan as "the best way to go," although it ain't "carved in stone."

Meanwhile, "one Democrat close to the White House" told the NY Times that "The president is going to continue to try to persuade everyone of the great value of having a true public plan," yet "at the end of the day ... he recognizes that there are other, arguably less effective, ways to achieve" health-care improvements.

The perfect is indeed the enemy of the good, but public faithfulness to that political axiom, as played out above, can be lethal; because the True Believers, the liberal-Dick Cheney types of all or nothing at all-ism, will have your head for hewing to the doable. Over the weekend Obama tried his own peculiar version of Yes, but: In Grand Junction, Co., he riffed for what must have been five minutes on the indispensability of a public option, only to suddenly dispense with it, by demoting it to a "sliver."

Now why would he want to go and do an exasperating thing like that? Why, naturally, because he's an unconscionable sellout, a typical Chicago pol, a treacherous corporatist, a blithering Bush-lite s.o.b. who's been plotting this betrayal for years. That's the knee-jerking tabloid analysis.

And then there's reality, something which the American presidency, after eight years of a severe dissociative disorder, has returned to grappling with. In short, Obama's Congressional "allies" have been publicly bailing on him like the 101st Airborne.

Kent Conrad, of the lugubrious Senate finance committee, recently combined the seeming tyranny of mathematics with the comprehensibility of the vernacular: "The fact of the matter is, there are not the votes in the United States Senate for the public option," he said. "There never have been. So to continue to chase that rabbit, I think, is just a wasted effort."

Or, there was Majority Leader Harry Reid's sidekick, Dick Durbin, who twice last week drew the curtain, fiddled with the beads and pronounced last rites: "It doesn't have to be a perfect bill," he said, meaning just what we thought it meant. My favorite, though, was Sen. Jim Webb, who, when asked if he still supports a public option, answered and then collapsed into a fetal position: "Yeah I do at the moment. I don't want to talk about it anymore." Insert thumb in mouth, and suck.

All that, of course, is what incubated the White House's desperate if rather inartful retreat. On this first-year, signature issue it simply cannot afford a Clintonlike loss, therefore it cannot continue to publicly insist on what is quite possibly a deal-breaker and presidency-buster.

Who knows. A public option may yet survive; there is still a long road ahead, congested with all manner of Congressional jostling and jockeying. The key point, however, is that that's where the action is -- where it properly is, where it has been, all along, out of post-Clinton political necessity.

And it's that necessity that makes much of the left's critical obsession with Obama's role so baffling; until, that is, one stops to ponder the basic human psychology behind it.

In the left's understandable frustration a villain is needed, for all that's gone wrong. The Congressional right is a rather inconvenient scapegoat, since it's in the largely impotent minority. Then there's the Democratic caucus, but let's face it: that, for the purpose of truly rewarding vilification, is about as inconvenient as the right -- it's but an unmemorable, vaporous blob of more than 300 individuals, against whom it's hard to work up a really frothing, satisfactory, personal hatred for.

Or, there's the president. Ah, that's the ticket -- one guy, one name, one face, one single human entity one can hang all the evil on. It's an economical solution to the often complicated game of blame-laying; easily comprehensible and, let us not forget, the way of tradition, too. For the ideological left -- not all of it, for sure, but much of it -- loves to eat its young. One perceived wrong step, even one out of sublime desperation, and presto, toast.