The politics of the public option withers on

I had hoped to be writing this morning of the Senate Finance Committee's final passage of its latest monstrosity -- few bills have ever begged for merger like this one -- but, as you know, that day of observance came and went with not atypical do-nothingness.

At the eleventh hour of the previous day, Chairman Max Baucus summoned the Delphic Congressional Budget Office, which, I'm sure, had in anticipation already summoned a fresh chicken, whose entrails the agency could read, and from such scientific workings then pronounce whether this vast Republic can afford to be well.

Perhaps today we'll know, or maybe later this week or next. The thing is, there could be fireworks in the voting stage, since two senators of the chairman's majority Democratic Party vocally think the chairman and his Republican bill suck. Ron Wyden laments the legislation's utter lack of choice for most Americans -- under its provisions "they're stuck" today, he says correctly, stuck tomorrow, stuck forever -- and Jay Rockefeller continues his campaign for the embattled public option, which, of course, didn't make the cut. Both men, reported the Washington Post Monday, "remained undecided Sunday."

Naturally the odds of an open rebellion in the paneled committee room are slim. But let your spirits flag not, for the floor show promises to be even better.

Reports The Hill, Senate majority leader Harry Reid and Max Baucus, "once in polite disagreement over the idea of a public option component in healthcare legislation, are approaching a breaking point over the issue." Baucus still insists there aren't the Senate votes for a public option -- not even the procedural votes, one assumes, to bust a filibuster -- so what's the bloody point; while Reid now says -- with, for Reid, shocking permanency -- that "We are going to have a public option before this bill goes to the president's desk," period.

The period, however, isn't the problem. No, the problem is that indefinite article, "a." Because a public option coming out may not look anything like the public option going in. Indeed, the ramping-up likelihood is that it'll be crammed through Congress' nifty Chop-o-matic, exsanguinated by a Republican senator's "trigger" and then, at the hands of assorted Democratic senators, have its molested bones bleached and scattered throughout the individual states.

If that's the case, don't look for many pro-public option senators to concede the conspicuous truth of the matter. The other day, for instance, I saw Chuck Schumer in an interview euphemistically talking about how the public option might be "tweaked" -- I'm pretty sure that's the word he so gently used -- but that it would survive Senate merger, conference, and a final vote. The public option is better dead than read out that way, though; an insulting masquerade of reform, a conceptual pat on the head, a meaningless crumb.

Yet what's even more disquieting is that none other than Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell now makes more sense than anyone else in Washington: "The Democrats were given a big majority," he politely reminded the nation. "They have the White House. They have a big majority in the House. They have 60 votes in the Senate. They ought to be able to do anything they want to," he said.

Yeah, that's kinda what voters thought. Why's that? Could be because that's what the coming "big majority" assured them.

The only encouragement this week came from the LA Times, which, as you undoubtedly know by now, reported that, "under heavy pressure from the Democratic Party's liberal base to breathe life back into it," the White House has, in turn, been pressuring, and President Obama has "been reaching out personally," to Senate Democrats to include a -- the? -- public option.

As one example, according to the Times, "When Obama spoke by phone with Sen. Maria Cantwell last week, he made a point of the breadth of support for the public option." But my abbreviated question posed immediately above was answered in another Times passage -- that Obama is exhorting senators "to take up some version of the idea" (my emphasis). Because the idea, as the White House has known for some time, is just too damn sensible for this industry-subsidized Democratic Senate.

Or so it still seems. Nevertheless, the White House has indeed been working in a pro-public option mode behind the scenes -- and more assiduously, as the Times' story made clear, than many among the "liberal base" believed -- and in that I found encouragement.

My guess is that once this Congress passes whatever sickly health-care reform it is destined to pass, this White House will emerge more aggressive on other legislation. Whether anyone likes the politics of it or not, it remains a brutal fact of political life that Obama simply cannot afford to take a losing hit on his first major initiative. He's got to have a bill -- period; and that's the one punctuation, singularly placed, that actually counts here -- to convert at least the appearance of success into real, influential power.