I'll just add to this by saying, I have no regrets about any money, hope, or other efforts I gave to Obama during his campaign, and I still hope I got this wrong.

Call me naive. Hell, I'm a kid in pigtails, it's not like I don't know it already.

But...shit. We need so much more than bipartisanship right now.

And it ain't like we're gonna get it no way no how, anyhow.

So...wtf?

It already IS bipartisan! Berny Sanders is for it, and he's not a dem! I can hardly believe that he is pushing back on this. There are some who say it is strategic, but I'm not sure. Elsewhere, Josh wrote this (sorry, I couldn't permalink for some reason):

count this as informed speculation. but the 'why' doesn't necessarily seem that obscure to me. consider this possibility: maybe the people at the White House think Reid et al. will go for the public option but then the whole thing will crash and burn on the senate floor. or maybe they think they can get the public option at the reconciliation stage but not now. but of those would explain why the white house is pushing back against reid's effort to get a real public option in the bill now. Again, let me be crystal clear. This is speculation. Call it a plausible hypothetical. For our reporting on the subject, see our posts at TPMDC. I make this point only to show that there are rational and fairly straightforward explanations for why Obama could be in favor of a public option as a general matter and yet be against it at this stage of the legislative process in the senate.

I don't know if the Prez forgot how to count, or if Rahm's spiked his cigarettes.

Let's suppose that 50 Ds and 1 R vote for the final package in the Senate.

Is that what our constitutional scholar president thinks the country will call "bipartisan?" Does he think getting Oly Snowe's vote is the same thing as "not pissing off Republicans?"

Whoosh. Maybe, as Josh intimates in CVille Dem's quote, there's some super-secret back room deal going on. Or maybe not.

Let's be clear. If a good, strong health care package passes, somebody's going to be pissed. The question for the administration is, do you want a bunch of pissed-off Republicans, or a bunch of pissed-off Democrats.

Cause you can't have it both ways.

I am done extending the president a very positive benefit of the doubt and making up hypothesis to protect my desire to have a positive view of him.

It's not all that hard to be better than Bush and Cheney. In fact just about any president is going to look good compared to that destructive duo.

I feel much more reserved and ready to take on even the president if he continues to demonstrate that he is going to work against the best interest of the people and that he is not going to stand for all that I came to believe he would stand for.

I will reserve my judgement until I know what is going on but right now he and his staff are in the dog house as far as I'm concerned.

I will keep focusing on congress regarding health care reform. My reps are all on board for a public option. Reid has a lot of pressure in his state to pass a public option and he is facing re-election. He has gained a reputation of being 'weak'. If Reid makes the public option happen... he will gain some ground.

I am going to be writing my reps about restructuring the makeup of the finance committee and replacing Baucus as Chairman. I would love it if he were not running the show there on every bill.

At this point, there are extensive negotiations underway to get 60 Senate votes (all Democrats) for an opt-out public option. A few additional concessions may be necessary, but the prospects are good.

Obama is wisely refraining from public dogmatizing, which would be counterproductive, but it would be surprising if the White House is not participating in the negotiations.

With or without a public option, the proposed bills make a good start toward robust healthcare reform, but only a start, because the extensive restructuring of the healthcare system needed to alter the current trajectory of increasing unaffordability is only addressed in small measure. Much more will be needed if we truly hope to make high quality healthcare affordable for all in the coming years.

The answer to your question is that it isn't a whole lot different from the right. We have one party in this country, as Gore Vidal once said, the party of property. In short, we the people are, once again, getting screwed.

The answer is that the whole story is sensational anon-sourced drivel. The media tells us to jump, and we ask "to which conclusion"?

The blogosphere has become prisoners of access. Without resources to investigate, and without the courage to name sources, we are being led by our noses to conclusions that appeal to our pre-conceived notions.

If you read between the lines, Josh, Digby, Ben Smith and others are admitting that they don't know the truth. But they insist on framing the discussion around their ill-informed assumptions. "I don't know if this is true, but if it is" has become the mantra of partisan journalism. Then the audience laps it up and assumes the worst and then demands that Obama assuage their fears. If Obama had to answer every damned rumor that has been whispered by the Politicos and HuffPosts of the world, he would have no other job. His admin's main responsibility would be whack-a-mole.

This kind of anon-sourced hokum is for revenue. It is a cheap and easy way to keep us reading. It is no better than Fox.

The health care negotiations are ongoing, and only named sources should be trusted. Everyone is keeping their cards against their chest because this not only about reform, it is a power struggle. If anything, this yellow chum is serving to separate the committed from the apathetic.

It's hard to remember sometimes that the White House is situated within the Beltway, too, and its occupants are subject to the same idiocies that the rest of the city believes. One of these foolish sayings is that it is "wrong" for fundamental changes of the sort envisioned here to become law by the vehicle of only one party.

I might accept this view is there were two actual functioning political parties. If, for instance, we were in an era where a Democratic Party controlled Congress was considering the proposals of a president from the same party and, say Senators Javits, Percy and Case expressed difficulty in voting for it; if Governors Rockefeller, Scranton, Romney (the father) thought the bill was unwise as drafted and made suggestions about how to change it, even if Senator Dirksen expressed a concern or too, I would question whether it was such a good idea to force the bill to passage.

We are not in that era, though, even if we wish we were or long for those days where political divisions were sometimes more North and South than Democratic/Republican. Today, North and South IS Democratic/Republican for the most part and there is only one party interested in the whether proposed legislation is a good idea or not. The other party has decided that if the New Deal ushered in 50 years of almost blanket control of Congress, any new New Deal must be resisted at all costs.

Obviously, President Roosevelt worked with a Congress more heavily Democratic than this one, although many of those Democrats were southerners who did not favor social programs, much as they do not do so today, but as part of the Republican Party. When conservative Democrats opposed aspects of the New Deal, President Roosevelt supported others to run against them but, since most of those efforts were unsuccessful, the Official Wisdom of the Beltway Class (even before there actually was a "beltway") was that he ought not to have done that.

I would bet anything that if he could be brought back to life (I have stared hard at his headstone several times, but it has not worked) he would advise anyone who asked to do the same thing. The point is not necessarily to beat faux Democrats such as Ben Nelson (though if Chuck Hagel decided to go back to the Senate by running against him, it would be hard to support Nelson) but to scare them into some level of progressivism.