P.M. Carpenter

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.

"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?

In this equivocating age of postmodern relativity, President Obama's observation yesterday that "TV loves a ruckus" is among the last absolute truths left on Earth.

Yet, as Congressional lawmakers dodge folding chairs back in their home districts -- live and in color and looped for 48 dramatic hours thereafter -- the president, even in the rootin-tootin' Old West, can't seem to scare up even a minor brawl or maybe a footwear-hurling critic when he needs one.

Obama could use the public sympathy -- something, anything to greater motivate the human forces of health-care reform. While the opposition is pumped, progressives are deflated.

It's rare I find something complimentary to say about Arlen "Tricky Dick" Specter, but I'm compelled to admit that his many accumulated years of Washington ho-hum-ness really paid off for him this week in terms of best management yet of a town hall circus.

Other pols are snapping back at the attending clowns, trying to correct or lecture or -- and here's the most pathetic reaction of all -- educate the rhetorical ruffians and civic scofflaws. But not Arlen. No, Arlen mostly just gazed and smiled and patted them on their dense heads and sent them on their agitated way, like a gentle and tolerant daycare supervisor. His deft handling of the incorrigible nincompoops was, in its own little way, a thing of prodigious beauty.

In the wake of their electoral caning last year, Beltway Republicans had two ways to go: They could moderate and try helping to correct the catastrophic conditions they had bequeathed -- a political course of action they understood nothing about; or, they could redouble their efforts of slash and burn -- a political course of action they understood everything about.

An interesting dilemma. Should one venture into a gleaming, positive new day, even while stumbling about blind and unsteadily feeling the way and, not to mention, alienating nearly all of one's traditional allies? Or should one intensify the darkness, knowing it's shamefully unhelpful, but also comforting, both internally and to friends, in a hunkering-down kind of way.

Well, they have provided their answer; in starker, more animated terms, they have shoved it down the nation's raw throat. But let us not allow hindsight to blind us to the fact that for a while, however fleeting, the question was an authentically open one.

I suppose the sooner we confess our addiction, the more quickly we can start recovering from ... Cable-news Freak Shows. We're hooked on them and we're not eating our vegetables anymore and just let's admit it and maybe someday we'll stop. Or not.

The most recent binge started with that one little video. It seemed so harmless at the time; we had no idea just how virulent it was and how much worse it would get. There she stood, on rather wobbly and grainy film, one lone, deranged harpy, shouting down a Delaware congressman at a town hall meeting, demanding to know why he and his fellow Republican lawmakers weren't doing more to expose the illegal-immigrant status of the President of the United States.

Cheers of approval rumbled throughout the gathered crowd. What percentage? No one knows, but it sounded sizable. The important thing, though, was that these people, the Birthers, were laughably, manifestly demented, and even better, crazy angry, meaning cable-news outlets had a soaring-ratings story; and they had it on tape, meaning they could run it and run it and run it until some other frothing, virulent ignorance could run as our fresh fix.

Jesus, by 10 a.m. I was ready for a scotch, no ice; the Sunday talk shows had droned depressingly onward and distinctly downward, assessing everything from mini-right-wing coups at the local community center to the looming potential of global warfare igniting in Iran, or Iraq, or Afghanistan, or Pakistan, or North Korea, or, just as likely, someplace we haven't thought of yet, just for a refreshing changeup in apocalyptic geography.

All that followed my usual morning embrace of the national press, a mercifully expeditious version of the above but every bit as much a downer, topped yesterday by two especially doleful ruminations: the Washington Post's Dan Balz's "Sunday Take," which zeroed in on President Obama's need to "rebalance" his administration's increasingly unbalanced infancy, and the NY Times' Frank Rich's worry about waiting for "some unexpected disaster to strike," while in the meantime "Beltway omens for the current White House are grim."

Yep, just one more reason to be glad the Wehrmacht went down to ignominious defeat: They and their ideological masters were, you see, as the Cliff Clavin of talk radio so knowledgeably informed us this week, "insanely, irrationally against pollution."

Not only that, as they burned and pillaged and raped and slaughtered their way through Europe and Euroasia and North Africa, wearing loutish insignia which looked -- wouldn't you just know it? -- strikingly similar to Obama's healthcare logo, they held within their black hearts a psychotic hatred of big business (which had financed their continental ravages), and wanted only to return to the fiscally profligate Fatherland, where, just like the bunch of left-leaning Nazis they were, they could enjoy "cradle-to-grave nationalized healthcare."

Those mid-century Teutons, however, probably didn't need such a comprehensive healthcare system quite as much as others, since they all stayed pretty healthy by toiling on "a whole bunch of make-work projects ... one of which was the Autobahn," and, once while taking a break from their founding of the first PETA chapter, they had "banned smoking."

This, as related by the New York Times, is the kind of thing that sends some progressives screaming into the tormented night:

"Pressed by industry lobbyists," wrote political reporter David Kirkpatrick, "White House officials on Wednesday assured drug makers that the administration stood by a behind-the-scenes deal to block any Congressional effort [within its health-care reform measures] to extract cost savings from them beyond an agreed-upon $80 billion."

It may be, as some are suggesting, that President Clinton's health-care plan had a moderately easier public-relations go of it, emerging, as it did, "before the Internet and cable news were mainstays in most American households" and when the befuddled and utterly befuddling "Harry and Louise" personified most of the opposition.

But an easier time is not what I recall. What I recall was an organized malevolence unmatched in American politics since the Great Society's Medicare or New Deal's Social Security. It -- health care's industrial opposition and its media jackals -- was mean and bloody and unconscionably deceptive. It was a time of frightful new lows for ascendant propagandists.