P.M. Carpenter

I've got to give Harry Reid credit. As political theatre he played this beautifully; as political comedy he delivered his double-take joke with a bamboozling flawlessness that inspires. And as political skulduggery? Let's just say that Shakespearean Democratic treachery is not dead.

As the Times' David Herszenhorn put it in the "Prescriptions" blog, Harry Reid -- "for the moment," anyway -- "is a champion of the liberal wing of the Democratic Party." But that one moment was all he needed. Because, as Herszenhorn went on to mildly puff, "should [Reid] be forced to compromise, presumably liberal lawmakers will be more forgiving, given that he has now shown a willingness to push hard for the public plan."

There's that "the" public option again, rather than "a" public option, which is what Harry proposed -- a bruised, bloodied, essentially d.o.a. substitute whose mere retention of the name has sent wishful liberals into orgiastic awe of Harry's suddenly bold ways.

If you want to know what "success" looks like in an American-tailored Middle East nation, look to Iraq.

There, after years of grinding determination, a peppy escalation, 4,500 dead Americans and roughly one trillion dollars, they're blowing themselves up again with distressing pre-escalation, pre-success vigor, as evidenced most recently in Sunday's Baghdad car bombings, killing more than 150 and wounding 500. Two months ago, just a few blocks away, car bombings killed more than 100.

The NY Times reported Sunday's "incident" somewhat eulogistically, writing that that nation's leader, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, "has painstakingly tried to present Iraq as having turned a corner on the violence that threatened to tear the country apart." And just about all this nation's leader, Barack Obama, could do was to issue a statement assuring Iraqis that we stand with them, while reminding them that they're pretty much on their own.

I'll try, I'll really try, to be as serious about this as I can, but such flagrant snookering by our progressive finest on Capitol Hill does provoke the irrepressible chortle.

In a NY Times story filed last Friday but written, obviously, on Thursday, we were told that Democratic leaders in the House "are so confident of their ability to round up the necessary votes" for the heartiest of pubic options "that they have told members of their caucus to be prepared for action on the House floor before Veterans Day."

Same story, Minority Leader John Boehner was described as "skeptical." You think? Because what he said was, "This talk of the Democrats’ having 218 votes is nonsense."

Next morning, top story, opening line, the Politico: "Speaker Nancy Pelosi counted votes Thursday night and determined she could not pass a 'robust public option.' " Oops. One wonders if Mr. Boehner's whip team is available for lease.

I don't know which was more insulting: "60 Minutes"' Steve Kroft's blithering, decontextualized indictment last night of the federal government's ability to competently manage a "medical bureaucracy," or the anonymous Democratic aide who mentioned last week to the NY Times that "There is a growing sense that we need to lead on [the public-option] issue and not wait for it to be offered on the Senate floor. The idea is that it’s better to show some fight."

OK, so neither Kroft's cheap shot or Sleeping Beauty's missed opportunity makes much difference at this late stage -- now, that is, that the public option has been officially downgraded by observing realists from a political hurricane to a topical storm. Still, both demonstrated, and rather vividly, the sad extent to which comprehensive health-care reform has been mangled, from execution to coverage.

I was going to write this morning about the latest events in our epic Beltway saga of health-care reform, but, at the rate events are moving, it seems that every columnist's column on the issue is hopelessly outdated by the time he finishes it.

No one has yet determined if Harry Reid can even count -- one day he has maybe 50-some-odd votes for some version or other of some radically modified concept of a recently redesigned and mostly optionless public option, the next day he has under 50, then, magically, he pole-vaults to 59 -- and yesterday, all within the span of a couple hours, we learned that Nancy Pelosi either a) does not have 218 robust votes, or b) actually does have the votes, but, in a negotiating maneuver that would make Machiavelli's head spin like something out of a William Peter Blatty novel, she's faking defeat.

Message breakdown.

Just as President Obama was telling NBC News this week that he "think[s] it is entirely possible that we have a strategy formulated before a runoff [in Afghanistan] is determined," his peripatetic secretary of state, John Kerry, was back in Washington, standing just outside the White House and telling reporters that he "would absolutely counsel the president to wait until the runoff. Just as a matter of common sense, he's going to want to know what kind of government he's going to be dealing with before he makes a decision."

For Kerry, who in his spare time doubles as the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, this was no gaffe. He's been consistent -- and vocal -- on the matter of election first, decision second.

The new news -- that public support for a public option has "rebounded" -- as reported by the Washington Post, was instantly tempered by the same old news: that latest, particular poll finding is one thing, said the Post, but let's do keep in mind, in fact why not "underscore," those "challenges ahead for the president and Democratic leaders in Congress as they attempt to maintain support among liberals and moderates in their own party while continuing to win over at least a few Republican lawmakers."

Because those challenges, it scarcely seems necessary to underscore, are also fundamentally irreconcilable goals. Indeed, maintaining (did the Post mean "achieving"?) the majority's unity has proven more problematic than reaching across the aisle.

Open a party's flaps and you get Big Tent Chaos; close them and you get small-minded, ideological insurgency -- either way, and in any combination, you get a legislative brick wall.

Today marks the end of only the ninth month of the Obama administration, yet it's already sounding much like FDR's administration as it headed, after four grueling years of vicious attacks by the right and determined shoves by the left, toward the 1936 election.

It was in June of that year, and not during his first campaign, as some mistakenly recall, that Roosevelt delivered his now-famous denunciation of "economic royalists." He had taken a roughly "corporatist" approach during what's known as the First New Deal, and what it earned him was bottomless ingratitude from the right, and persistent criticism -- not to mention growing political threats -- from the left.

What then followed was the corrective, more liberal Second New Deal -- Social Security, jobs programs, the Wagner Act, etc. -- and that abovementioned sharp rhetorical shift, which, as further noted, seems to be where the Obama White House is already headed.

"It is still something that I am struggling with," said progressive Congressman Earl Blumenauer to the New York Times' Carl Hulse. "It has been a hard landing for a lot of the people that I represent," he added, meaning whom the Times called his "largely liberal constituency" in Portland, Ore.

In the interview, Blumenauer's attitude was, of course, intended as shorthand for all elected Beltway progressives, and his constituency as representative of progressives nationwide. And the "question" for both, as the Times put it, is "whether" -- "now [that] political reality has set in" -- "they relent on some of their core beliefs to support less satisfying compromises, despite being in what, on the surface, is a commanding political position."

The published interview was loaded with prefigured answers, beginning with the Times' description of Blumenauer as an experienced pol in possession of a "pragmatic brand of progressivism" and then leaping directly to that seemingly minor but in fact towering dependent clause above: "on the surface."

Last night, on Chris Matthews' "Hardball," there appeared a Tea Partyer -- from Texas, I think, though I'm not sure, as during the segment's opening I was preparing my typical American-proletarian feast of generic Rice Krispies -- who was hustling the fiction that he and his little neanderthal band's "movement," if you will, is nonpartisan and non-ideological.

Matthews sat stupefied, if not amused, pursuing logic and history, which is always a wasteful mistake with these guys.

Where, asked Matthews, were you folks and your outrage when George W. Bush was busting the budget like a Mad King Ludwig and putting plutocrats on lavish government welfare? And what was Barack Obama to do, when he inherited this wreck of a nation, other than try to stimulate the economy? Was he to emulate Herbert Hoover? Is that what you wanted?