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.

With the banner headline on TPM being the latest in a string of hyped negative news about the imminent political collapse of President Barack Obama, I wanted to send this friendly little reminder to my brothers and sisters in arms reading this site today.

There is no news to report on health care.  There was not going to be news to report on health care while Congress was in recess in the month of August.

We are in a state of ever increasing demand for something to happen on the health care front.  And after weekly headlines throughout June and July sent us on a roller coaster ride that sometimes frustrated, sometimes encouraged, but ultimately resulted in a bill passing four congressional committees, the daily lack of movement or news feels somehow like a defeat.

But the absence of action, at least this month, is not the result of progress denied, but the consequence of no news to report during recess.  In short, the problem isn't the bill: it's August, stupid.

Readers and writers need to get a grip on the calendar we're dealing with on health care.
The Obama White House had initially set a pre-recess deadline to pass a bill on the floor of each house.  Their thinking was that momentum would be greatest if they could fast track a bill and keep caucus members from being exposed to weeks of negative attacks back home.  Although they didn't anticipate the teabagging guerrillas at the town halls, they did know full and well that August would be unpleasant without a bill.

We are, in short, seeing how right they were.

But the fact remains that health care is in no better or worse position now than it was on August 1.  The feeling of foreboding, panic, or the abstract sense of impending doom shared by many in pro-reform circles, is due more to a lack of news than any real setback.  More to the point, the constant string of bad news in the past weeks has been more a cause of the news vacuum of August recess, giving reporters and pundits nothing else to do but report on town hall conflicts, premature "Obama has failed" obituaries, or worthless "what Obama could've done differently" navel gazing.

We need to set our sights on September.  That's when the action resumes, and that will be the make-or-break period of getting health care done.

The White House knows this.  Congressional leadership, including Chuck Schumer, know this.  And they're not panicking because their schedule is set by action in Congress, not by the empty airtime on cable networks.  They know that Chris Matthews does not have a vote in the Senate.

This ain't over.  Get in the game.

Dear editors:

It's been a while since I had a moment to write a full diary on this site.  And although I don't have much more in the way of time today, I have enough impatience and frustration with the chicken-little narrative coursing through the panicky bloodstream of the liberal blogosphere and MSM to send off this little missive:

Get that load of tripe written by Newsweek's Howard Fineman off your headline scroll, or at least post a prominent rebuttal.

I'm talking about this: "Obama Health Care: What went wrong?"

I've been nearly at wit's end these past 72 hours, and actually the past two months, contending with gloom and doom prognostications from health care activists who feed on every exaggerated setback and phony bit of analysis from the shallow DC press.  People like Fineman are decent journalists, but they are lemmings when it comes to doing any original or outside-the-beltway thinking.

Fineman is not like the Associated Press or ABC, which have been taking every opportunity to feed doubts about health care or demoralize the reform coalition, but his brand of thinking is not helpful right now.

The fact is that the health care bill is very much alive and the negotiations are in full motion.  We can't pretend to know how this match will play out, but there are at least good odds that we will get a major bill signing.

And yet Howard Fineman comes in not just to opine about why health care failed, but how historians (!!!) will come to see the failure of the first year of Obama's presidency.

We're not even out of August.  Jesus!

The problem right now is that the health care story, from a journalistic angle, is stuck on August 1, with no possible new news until September.  What's a reporter on a deadline to do?

Well, he can start by feeding the frenzy of defeatism that will find a ready audience on the right, anxious for news of health care's demise, and on the left, in all out conniptions over their perceptions that Obama and the Democrats have sold them out.

Oh, the drama.

We can help this quagmire by lending a little assistance to the narrative and giving the elite readers of this blog a little perspective--or at least remind them of the bigger picture before they go writing such garbage in an attempt to fill copy space.

So for now, I respectfully ask again:  get that column off this site or at least post a vigorous rebuttal.

I left this information in a comment to Brian Beutler's story yesterday, but considering the legs under the Obama defense budget story, culminating with Jon Stewart's magnificent send-up, I thought it worth rehashing.

During the Iowa caucuses, all the presidential candidates were courted by a grasroots group working to raise awareness about waste in the defense budget.

Obama produced a video for this group, which you can watch on YouTube (the embedding function has been disabled).

In the video from October 2007, Obama pledges to reduce missile defense, nuclear weapons, space weaponization, and Future Combat Systems.  In short, he promised to do exactly what Secretary of Defense Robert Gates outlined this week.

Obama took this stance during the campaign at great political risk, and he was quite predictably attacked by John McCain and the right wing media.  What made the attacks especially egregious was that they went beyond attacking what Obama actually said and distorted his position on Future Combat Systems (written with capital letters to signal a specific Army program) to suggest that Obama was against future combat systems (lower case to suggest Obama was some anti-military radical).  Worse still, Future Combat Systems, or FCS, was a program that John McCain himself opposed as part of his anti-pork zealotry.  Yes, there was a time when McCain fought against real wasteful spending and not bear DNA and San Francisco marsh mice.

What does this story tell us about Obama?

As I said yesterday, I think it tells us that Obama is one of those politicians who takes his campaign promises seriously, and he's not afraid of a fight.  By empowering Bob Gates to make these military reforms, Obama was inviting a fierce and dishonest attack from a multi-billion-dollar defense industry with powerful allies in Congress.  These reforms are modest and common-sense in scale, but they are revolutionary in their political scope.

This is something to keep in mind as some our political allies are flailing about this week at the thought that Obama is betraying his people over other issues, such as the banking plan or civil liberties.

Take a step back and see the policies play out.

UPDATE:
This is why I love TPM.  Their crews are on the beat, monitoring the cable news to find this gem from Rep. Sestak of Pennsylvania.  Also note that Joe Scarborough (R-Blowhard), opens the segment talking about the military "cuts" to the growing defense budget.

Reading Josh's latest post, "Bigger Than the Both of Us," I wanted to highlight a moment during Obama's town hall meeting in Costa Mesa, CA, yesterday that speaks to his larger point.

Josh argues that people are really angry about the imbalance of power between AIG and Treasury and the ability of the banks to dictate terms to the federal government, and not so much the money.

He writes:

From Geithner and Summers, and indirectly from Obama, we keeping hearing financial-legal versions of 'It's bigger than the both of us'. Like we're along for the ride, still taking dictates from the people who got us into the mess we're in.

I think Obama and his team are fully aware of the stakes and the dangers we face, and to a large extent, Josh is exactly right.

Here's a loose transcript of what Obama had to say yesterday (at about 1:02:00 in the C-Span video):

Why not just let the banks fail?  See somebody's clapping!  ... Well, here's the problem... When you've got big banks, Citicorp or Bank of America or Wells Fargo, that control 70 percent of the banking system, and all of them are weakened, you can't afford to have all those banks all at once start going under.  Even though the deposits are guaranteed, the entire economy is resting on that credit... They can take down businesses large and small alike...  We had too step in, and it was the right thing to do.  Even though it's infuriating.  Even though it makes you angry.
Same thing with AIG... Here's the problem: it's almost like they've got a bomb strapped to them and they've got their hand on the trigger. You don't want them to blow up, but you got to talk to them-- ease their finger off the trigger.

The metaphor of the AIG execs and all the captains of finance holding the economy hostage like a suicide bomber makes for a pretty jarring image, but that's essentially the idea Josh was trying to capture, too.

What gives me confidence, however, is that the president seems to have both eyes open to the situation.  He doesn't want to defend what's happened.  He acknowledges how bad things are.  But he doesn't want to overindulge in protestations and demonstrations of his outrage--OUTRAGE!--and lose sight of what's at stake.

If Josh is right about the pulse of the people, and Obama and his team are tackling the problem, then the upcoming new regulatory proposals should help address some of these concerns.  In the meantime, the president needs to stay in front of the public and keep reminding them of what the administration is doing and what the plan is.  Hence the Leno appearance tonight, the town halls, and the prime time news conference on Tuesday.

At least, that's my hope.  And of course, it will all be moot if the Treasury IG report comes out the wrong way.  But if we start seeing the policy roll out that attempts to address the controversy in meaningful ways--and not just the regular congressional theater--let's make sure to see it in this context

UPDATE: See the WashPo's cover story for Thursday, "How the Fed Failed to Tell Obama About The Bonuses"

UPDATE II:  And what Al Giordano said.

No, this is not a post extolling the virtues of Tim Geithner.  But TPM readers might be interested to follow the discussion thread under Elana Schor's post "Report: Treasury Knew About AIG Bonuses Earlier Than Obama Administration Claims" from earlier today.

Responding to Schor's innuendo,

When the debate comes down to a Nixon-style "what did he know and when did he know it," things aren't looking good. And we may have just reached that point for Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner.

Forsythe jumps in to write that Schor has omitted a fairly important qualification in the Time story, specifically that career staffers at Treasury may not have relayed the information up the Treasury hierarchy to Geithner.  In other words, blasting a headline that "Treasury" somehow "knew" about the bonuses before Geithner earlier acknowledged, and then taking the bullet train to Nixonland, somehow added a few more sirens and flashing lights to the story than might have been justified by the facts.

The ensuing discussion in the comment thread stood at 56 posts at the time of writing, my favorite of which coming from  JohnMcCSF:

Nixon?

RU drunk?

There's been a tendency this week on TPM to cover this AIG scandal with a bit of editorial flare that has bordered on reckless.  I humbly cite my own post from yesterday, pointing out that TPM headlined a pretty far-fetched take on Obama's handling of the bonus issue, suggesting that he was somehow going back on his word.  The WSJ article to which they linked said nothing of the kind.

And since we're setting a precedent for baseless speculation, let me offer my own:  one of the reasons this AIG story has such staying power, aside from the obvious rage it provokes, is that commenters of all political stripes have an interest in pushing it.  For pundits on the left, who were never sweet on Geithner or Summers, we now have a hook on which we can demand something they've wanted for weeks: get rid of Geithner.  I offer Exhibit A.

I don't mean to assert any kind of excuse or weak defense of the Treasury Secretary or the Obama administration's scrambling on the issue, nor do I wish to make too many generalizations of progressive bloggers.

My problem with this whole story is that we have a lot of people, all with different agendas, joining a feeding frenzy, and this environment is not healthy for making decisions.  If we get into a situation where the record shows that Geithner, or anyone else in the administration, approved the bonuses at AIG or at any other TARP bank or, worse, lied about it, then we really will have a problem.  Based on the facts so far, I can't say with any certainty what actually happened.  All I know is that this AIG story is one of many messes that will continue to lag from the last administration--and I don't like how the politics is shaping up one bit.

Until then, I must ask that if the managers of TPM have made an editorial decision that Geithner must get the boot, they should just come out and say it.  Nevermind this sensationalizing of the facts.

That said, I still love this site.  Nothing but love.

This is my first blog entry on TPM, and I'm afraid it must be brief.

Will someone please second my motion to have the editors change the headline about the AIG bonuses: "Obama admin won't block AIG bonuses despite tough talk."

Whatever your opinion of the AIG bonuses, the tough talk, or the policy underlying all of them, this headline is loaded and highly misleading.

If you actually read the WSJ article linked from the TPM headline, you'll see that the president's people are hedging about rescinding the bonuses, since a lot of them have already been disbursed, but are nonetheless looking to recuperate the money through other channels.

What's the problem with that?  It might not be as satisfying as knowing that Geithner et al. were smart enough to block the bonuses in advance, but recovering the money and imposing tougher restrictions on AIG would appear to match talk with action.

TPM is frothing a bit too much today.