<< Bipartisan Senate negotiators are weakening some of his top priorities, leaving the president with a difficult choice: He can give ground, and implore disappointed liberals to go along with him. Or he can try to ram through a Democratic bill with his wishes intact, infuriating Republicans.>>
http://news.yahoo.com/...
Strategically, he has no choice but to ram. If he can.
Obama has bet his administration on health care reform. If he doesn't get something through, having pushed this hard and the honeymoon period over, he's finished. (Even if, [your deity here] forbid, there was another 9/11, Obama wouldn't get the rally Bush did. All we'd hear was "Why didn't he keep us safe?")
So it's now or never. If he can't deliver now, he ain't gonna deliver. And whatever spin he might put out to the contrary, there will be no shortage of right-wingers to fill the Sunday talk shows explaining that no public option meant he did not deliver. (And the true unemployment rate isn't likely to be any lower when the anti-Obama attack ads from Republicans running in 2010 begin airing on TV in the next several months...)
So I think "co-op" spells Obama looking for a new job in 2013. Can't bring yourself to believe that he's outpowered by the Blue Dogs?
<< "There's no doubt that what we'll have at the end of the day will not fully satisfy any major player in this process," he said. The most important goal, he said, is to improve the nation's health care system.</p>
"Everyone is going to have to give a little to get there," Axelrod said. >>