The one part of your analysis I find mystifying: how can the Dems blame Republicans for blocking better reforms, when most of the coverage and popular perceptions say Democrats are in charge and fighting among themselves? Credit and blame will matter going forward, but I think most citizens will blame Obama and the Dems for any shortfalls or unintended ill consequences. Same is happening with the Stimulus.

Amidst all the worry about racism, etc, I wonder if any other Democratic President elected with such effort and large margins would give away so much if the Speaker of the more liberal House were not a female. Obama's people do not take women leaders seriously, I fear, and despite denials, they are "triangulating" against Democrats just like Clinton did.

I hope this is too pessimistic. But at stake is whether, at the most promising juncture in a generation, we are going to move away from federal-subsidies-for-the-wealthy style government toward building the shared interests of the middle class and the poor. Obama talks good, but does not walk the walk. He will therefore end up reinforcing the status quo.

If so, he WILL own the result -- and it won't be pretty politically for either him or the Democratic Party. Middle class Americans will punish a party that forces people to buy private insurance without enlarging choice and lowering prices.

As an analyst, I now think that failure is likely here -- the tenth time in a hundred years.

Theda Skocpol

I am critical of Obama to a considerable degree -- I wrote in the NY
Times blog last week that he should have taken this forward himself many weeks ago. But there is more to this overall battle than just-any-kind-of-public-option -- which was never as good an approach in my view as expanding Medicare would be (single payer expansion in other words).

Still, you will have to admit, won't you, that neither the Dem leaders nor the Obama administration really want to go the reconciliation route (and they do not explain it well to regular Americans, either; they should call it "majority rule"!) They may think they cannot fashion a reconcliliation approach that gets enough Democrats. So my post is about how progressives should think about trade-offs if we do not get the ROBUST public option we want.
I believe that fixating on a weaker and weaker public option figleaf at the expense of the other goals would be a mistake.

As to regulation, I am a political scientist and I know all you say about DC ways. It remains the case that, historically, there HAVE been instances of strong rather than weak/interest-riddled federal regulation. That is why I said we should push for a focused, simple regulatory regime with strong powers of data collection in the hands of the regulators. It might evolve in better than usual directions, because the idea here, going forward, is to DIVIDE THE ELITES, to get business and government interested in cost containment after all Americans are somehow included, so that private insurance companies can be reined in. That is not at all impossible -- and there is no scenario in any of the reforms now on the table where it would not be necessary from a progressive point of view.

Robust public option or no, the private insurance giants must be regulated. Competition alone will not do it. They should also gradually be nibbled away by an expanding Medicare program (single payer).

Just to be clear: I think, and have thought all along, that Obama as President should make a compelling case for a Medicare-like choice to be available to all Americans. To be fair, he often has, and maybe he will again. I wish he would explain it vividly and clearly in ways regular folks can understand.

It is not accurate to say that Republicans in power did not compromise. As extreme as their rhetoric is, and as much as they get/got, they did not get all they wanted in Congress -- for example, tax cuts for the rich without sunset clauses. The fact that they had to settle for some sunsets allows Obama to let some of these boondoggles "expire."

I agree with your frustration about the Democrats. But the fact is this battle has been mishandled in the past four months, and the blame for that is widespread. Now we have to deal with where we are.

The fact that Specter may come around after some consmetic maneuvers on EFCA does not soften this for me. EFCA without public choice in health care is not that much progress. And unions are beginning to look as if they are putting their organizational interests above the wellbeing of most Americans -- that is how it comes across when they meet with Specter and talk only about EFCA, not about public choide in health care.

Theda S.

Also, it seems to me that national Republican leaders will have less sway with folks like Pawlenty, not more. What do they actually have to offer?

It is just implausible that, after that, if Coleman chooses to continues to deploy himself as a national Republican delaying tactic, the Supreme Court USA will actually take this case. Accepting such a case would immediately constitutionalize all discrepancies in counting interpretations across counties and states in the US -- involving the Court itself in adjudicating close elections from now on and in working out the messy details of standards for interpreting and tallying votes everywhere.

Existing scholarship on Court decisions does show that political orientations of Justices matter, but also that Justices tend to act to protect the autonomy and legitimacy of their own branch. Extending Bush v. Gore to all state elections would embroil and undermine the Court. Even the original authors of that very risky opinion knew this, which is why they said in plain text that the decision was not a precedent. Now there is a new Chief Justice who would be dooming his own institution to perpetual politicization if he chose to -- what? -- play Mitch McConnell's game? Why would he want to do that?

All the SCUSA has to do is dodge the case. They will, assuming Coleman even tries to go forward after the MNSC. It will all be over by mid-April.

Also, there was a decidely elegaic tone adopted in both Friedberg's closing and Coleman's post-court press conference today. Friedberg almost sounded as if he was apologizing for a sloppy case, and Coleman kept talking about the good that would come out of this case in enfranchising more Minnesota voters, as proposed by both sides, "no matter who wins." Ginsberg, the Republican hack and Bush v. Gore veteran, gave the national party line; but apart from him, it did not sound as if Coleman is spoiling to carry this further, turning himself into a yet-more-obvious tool of unpopular Congressional Republicans. His fundraising cannot be good and he may care about his reputation in Minnesota.

I am willing to bet it will end fast after the Minnesota courts finish.

Remember, while both sides have shown errors here, and there were no doubt some in earlier stages, neither side -- certainly not Coleman -- has presented any evidence as to how the votes would fall if corrected. That just cannot be known for earlier stages, and the best that can be done now -- which the judges seem to see -- is to find as many legal votes not yet counted as possible and count them.

Everyone fears a repeat of 2000 in the Supreme Court, but it is doubtful that even the SCUSA would like to do that one again; all of those justices will go down in historical infamy for imposing a terrible president on the USA. It gets even more dubious for them if they plunge into the minutiae of "equal protection" in every single close election in the land, arguing that errors always create uneven standards. Why would the Supreme Court want to get drawn into re-doing every close election? It would be a horror, and automatically delegitimating, for the Court. They will not do it, all the more because the Constitution assigns this sort of thing to the Senate (when a questioned Senate election is involved). The Supreme Court knows that, and knows that MN runs election as well as any part of the USA, so the last thing they will do is take up this case on equal protection grounds.