I'm on the verge of slamming my head in the car door every time I hear a smart person refer to Obama "letting" Congress take the lead on health care.

The latest edition came from none other than Charlie Cook, who Josh just linked in the post "Drift":

Before long, his strategy of letting Congress take the lead in formulating legislative proposals and thus prodding lawmakers to take ownership in their outcome caused his poll numbers on "strength" and "leadership" to plummet.

Despite the constitutional groundings that leave Congress in charge of writing laws, and even progressive cheers when folks like Sen. Brown of Ohio boast that the WH doesn't write the final bill, we still see this witless pronouncement from the wise old pundits.  This was a meme from people who got too accustomed to Bush getting rubber stamps from his party in Congress--or who found Clinton's top-heavy health care debacle in 1994 too easy to forget.

Every time someone repeats this idea on a reputable media platform, the country gets just a little more historically and civically ignorant.

That said, Cook is definitely reading a public opinion trend that is unsurprising considering how events have seemed to overwhelm every politician in Washington.  But this reality, I remain convinced, is the product of Max Baucus delaying the bill through August recess and allowing the slow news month to degenerate into a pointless merry-go-round of wondering whether Obama really, really, really wanted the public option enough.

The last few days have seen only an acceleration of this trend, with bloggers and reporters, convinced that what they heard only a few moments ago is the new normal, feverishly reporting on things that are moving very fast and that won't start to settle until the president speaks to Congress on Wednesday.

But before anyone takes a seat on the ledge of a tall bridge, remember that Cook is describing the political landscape as it exists right now, and he likely brings a big lag time in his analysis, accumulating political wisdom as it existed through July and August.  If this last year should teach us anything, it's that conditions change very quickly when the country tries to deal with big initiatives.  We're just used to seeing it.

But for the sake of honesty and for the health of the body politic, can we refrain from this one destructive conceit about the presidency and Congress?

With that, I'll refer everyone back to Norm Ornstein's op-ed in the Washington Post, who praised Obama's congressional strategy for all the relevant reasons:

The Obama strategy since his election has been based on a gimlet-eyed and pragmatic assessment of the prospects and limits afforded by public opinion and the political process. A naive president would have assumed that, after a landslide victory, huge coattails, swollen partisan majorities and a high approval rating, he could have it all -- and pushed hard and early for a far-reaching, soup-to-nuts upheaval of the health-care system. Obama and his strategists understood that would not work.
...
How to prevail under these difficult circumstances? The only realistic way was to avoid a bill of particulars, to stay flexible, and to rely on congressional party and committee leaders in both houses to find the sweet spots to get bills through individual House and Senate obstacle courses. Under these circumstances, the best intervention from the White House is to help break impasses when they arise and, toward the end, the presidential bully pulpit and the president's political capital can help to seal the deal.

No health reform bill can be enacted unless the House and Senate each pass a version, and that has been the single-minded goal of the White House.

UPDATE: It looks like Ezra Klein is more or less on my side of this argument in his recently published take-down of David Brooks:

To put it more simply, Congress writes and passes legislation. The president cannot write legislation or pass it. What is the White House to do about that?

The president does not have the power to substantially change the dynamics of Congress on health-care reform, or big bills in general. If they did, Clinton would have passed health-care reform, as would Nixon and Truman and FDR. But what Brooks tells his readers today is that this is, in fact, Obama's fault. It is a lack of presidential audacity as opposed to congressional will. But this is worse than untrue: It's damaging. It feeds the persistent delusion that the fix to our problems is a different president or a better White House strategy. [emphasis added]

This last bit about the damage we've done to our ability to move the political process by projecting blame on the president is important, and it's a charge that could be equally leveled against Paul Krugman and much of the progressive blogosphere of late.  Our problem is not with Obama as much as it's the fault of certain self-interested Senators, corrupt special interest politics, and a division of powers that puts the fate of change in the hands of a few senatorial plutocrats.

When the president speaks next Wednesday, we should take a moment to remember that this guy is the best advocate we've got, and he's up against an impossible system that resists change by design.  Undermining him only weakens the rest of us.