I hope there is no truth in the reports that the White House is telling Reid it will not help cement the 60 votes for an up or down decision on a Senate bill with the opt-out public option -- Option Squared we might call it. This is the least Obama can do -- stand firmly behind this compromise. He and Emmanuel need to cajole and bargain and speak up to get this done!

If Obama's White House does not come through, progressives should let him understand that we will have little enthusiasm for him and for Democrats going forward. It is not just Congress that has skin in this game -- so does Obama for 2012 and for all his policy decisions going forward. Many of us on the moderate left have put up with a lot of wavering and disappointing decisions from him. We won't accept a betrayal of even Harry Reid (!) on the last reasonable prospect for a public option in health care reform. Indeed, we will not accept anything less than enthusiastic mobilization for this public option.

Get off the dime, Obama! Tell your weak-kneed Clinton advisors to stop signalling cave-ins or "I told you sos" that will just encourage backsliding in the Senate. Back up the Democrats in making something of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity in heath care reform. If you want continued support with other steps toward middle-muddling-caution, this is the price: get a decent health reform law signed into law. Otherwise, face fired up Republicans versus tepid and disillusioned Democrats. You will not like the result.

The 2009 battle over health care reform is soon going to come to a head in national debates and legislative specifics. President Obama will re-set the agenda when he speaks to Congress, and in all likelihood sheer survival instincts will prompt Democrats in both House and Senate to generate some legislation that can be taken to conference and finally signed by the President. For progressives, it is already clear that the final result, if anything at all, will be much less than we hoped -- and perhaps much less than might have been possible if this battle had been better waged from the grass roots to the White House.

But that is the way it always is: there are compromises and half-measures in the end. The issue for progressives right now is how can we push for compromises that open doors politically, that promise to get all Americans covered somehow and spur interest groups in the future to work for shared arrangements that can manage costs.

Rather than remain fixated on one mechanism -- the "public option," make or break -- progressives need to be clear about principles for weighing trade-offs and compromises. And we need to think about how future developments might unfold from half-steps taken now. This kind of over-time thinking is tough in a 24-hour news/blog cycle and in an atmosphere where ephemeral polls are given too much weight. But it is vital,

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Fellow Americans, and fellow Democrats and Obama supporters, we are at a moment of truth, a pivotal turning point -- in the form of what happens in the next days and weeks with robust, universal health reform. A fork in the road socially, economically -- and politically. It could go either way depending on Obama and the Democratic officeholders many of us worked so hard to elect. They have the power to act, but will they use it -- or lose it?

If at this remarkable juncture Obama and the Democrats cannot enact a robust health care reform -- with a strong nationwide public option, cost controls, and nearly universal coverage -- I would not want to be in charge of fundraising and mobilization for them in the 2010 and 2012 elections! Most of us who supported them last time will of course not vote for a Republican.. But if Obama and the Democrats cannot act now on a once in a half century challenge and opportunity, they are not worthy of extra energy. And those of us who wrote big checks last time will tell the Democrats -- especially in the Senate -- to hold pharmaceutical fundraisers instead.

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The sight of this new President before all of assmbled official Washington is, in its way, as extraordinary as the other standout moments of this past half year: Denver in Mile High; election night in Grant Park; the DC Inaugural. All of those showed Obama directly amidst throngs of the American people, yet even here, amidst the new official Washington, he speaks to -- and for -- the citizenry. Repeatedly in this speech, Obama presented himself as fighting for a people of goodness and resolve -- for a better, shared future for all Americans. This is a very effective way for him to marginalize political enemies and call elites as well as regular citizens to greater personal and social responsibility.

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After months on the campaign trail, newly inaugurated President Obama may have hoped to work from home, govern from the White House and spend every evening with his kids.  Fuhgetaboudit.  After just a few weeks it is obvious that Obama and associates in the White House and the Cabinet have to keep traveling around the country, with the President himself going out of almost every week like a medieval king in the preabsolutist era making a "progress" from region to region.  The United States is in crisis while DC talking heads remain as irresponsible and out of touch as ever; they are like the aristocrats of Old Regime France well after the revolution had started.  To escape the aristocratic death grip, Obama must do all kinds of outreach -- including to Republicans with real world responsibilities -- in the states and cities across the country that are grappling with the concrete human and business realities of this gathering depression, as well as living out the consequences of the terrible policies of the past several decades.

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Although some have pooh-poohed Obama's Inaugural Address, it rewards thoughtful rereading of its central message and resonate passages. One powerful part speaks to today's TPM/Democracy discussion about Opportunity.

Having acknowledged the power of market capitalism to generate wealth and expand freedom, just-minted President Obama reminded us that socially regulated markets are necessary because "... a nation cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous. The success of our economy has always depended not just on the size of our Gross Domestic Product, but on the reach of our prosperity; on our ability to extend opportunity to every willing heart -- not out of charity, but because it is the surest route to our common good."

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In the wake of a momentous victory, Barack Obama, the Democrats, and the nation are at a watershed. Transformations that complement and deepen one another can happen in four momentous areas -- in race relations, in the economy and social contract, in America's place in the world, in our civic democracy and partisan balance. Much of the punditry we hear deals in false opposites and fails to grasp the propitiousness of this moment. Let's look at each part of Obama's challenge to see why he can accomplish complementary enduring and major changes in all these spheres.

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Paul Krugman's Nobel Prize is wonderful news. It appropriately honors his work as an economist -- and it will have the salutory effect of enhancing his impact as a public intellectual at a key juncture in US and world history. When it was not at all fashionable, we all need to remember, Krugman consistently spoke against the mendacity of the Bush administration. He correctly predicted the disasters in foreign and economic policy to which that administration's horrendous and corrupt decisions would lead. Bravo to him -- and thanks to the Nobel committee.

Avoiding the spewing bile of McCain's dying campaign, I took a few days off to drive the backroads of New England looking for antiques. Yesterday, in the early morning light, I drove from Bethel, Maine down to Cornish on Route 5, reveling in one of the most beautiful Columbus Day weekends in many years. With lakes and the White Mountains of New Hampshire in the far vista, brilliant sunlight dappled through the fire red, orange, and yellow trees set off against the blue sky and omnipresent evergreens. Dappled light hit the white houses and churches and occasional small graveyards omnipresently nestled along Maine backroads, where life and death easily coexist.

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Every day until November -- and in person in next Tuesday's debate -- McCain and his people are going to raise one smear of Obama after another. Will Obama respond effectively and keep his lead? A lot is at stake here: the 2008 election and the future of American politics, its capacity to cut off the kind of vicious falsehoods that have worked so well in the past. Are we going to want to live in the kind of polity we will end up with if Obama fails to respond with sufficient strength and specificity?

Certainly Obama needs to keep the focus on major issues and talk directly to voters about their economic needs and concerns. In Tuesday's debate, he should do much less responding to McCain's agenda and mostly look at voters through the camera and speak of their real-life concerns. And he should ask voters practical questions -- such as "how will it be for your family to try to pay new taxes on your health plan, or deal with insurance companies that can deny you coverage if you get sick, or find a new plan costing $12,000 or more with less than half that much to spend?" If you cannot afford that on top of all the other rising costs and worries you face, then you cannot afford John McCain."

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Upon hearing the news of McCain's latest gambit -- campaigning/distracting by claiming to "suspend" his campaign and ditch the debate -- a friend of mine suggested it shows his racist attitude toward Obama, his unwillingness to accept him as an equal competitor. McCain has certainly repeatedly showed this disrespect throughout the campaign, and has often tried to insert himself as Obama's manager. But I responded to my friend that the real issue here is McCain's obvious disrespect for American democracy. He is running a campaign in which he and his ridiculously unqualified running mate refuse to answer press questions and confine their appearances to stage-managed events. Now, with a major event that would be partially unscripted and very telling on the horizion, McCain suddenly decides to appoint himself President and "go to Washington to resolve a pressing national crisis." Who does he think he is kidding? He is just trying to avoid laying out his views and taking questions so voters can evaluate him compared to Obama.

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Here is the message that needs to get across in TV ads, Obama's speeches, and Biden's and many surrogates' comments: America cannot afford ANOTHER President and VP who lie to us (just as Bush and Cheney have often done). Turn McCain's transgressions into an act of perfidy against the country, rather than just "playing unfair." Tie McC and Palin to Bush and Cheney and, at the same time, present them as a threat now and for the future.

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Every major media outlet has now reported that Sarah Palin is not telling the truth about her aggressive earmark-seeking and her support for the Bridge to Nowhere (until Congress cancelled it and she took the money for other projects). Now, today, the Washington Post gives us the amazing revelation that she routinely charged the State of Alaska for her living expenses while she resided at home, and charged family costs to the state when she traveled on (mildly) official business to burnish her personal image. This is the portrait of a liar and someone who milks the public for personal advantage. Regardless of legalities in a formal sense, Palin has a sleazy profile. She is no reformer.

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Tonight at Mile High will be extraordinary, I am sure; and I am so pleased that my twenty-year-old son Michael, heading the Brown Daily Herald news team, will be there to witness Obama's acceptance speech. But for me personally it would be hard to top last night at the Democratic Convention, listening to Bill Clinton and Joe Biden set the stage for Obama and bring the nation and the Democratic Party to the brink of the most important political watershed in the past four decades.

As Michigan State college students in 1966 and 1967, my hustand-to-become Bill and I met while working on a Civil Rights project in Mississippi. We participated in a small way in the fight for American fulfillment through the enfranchisement of blacks and in the repudiation of racial segregation that our generation helped to junp-start. Then, in 1968, we cried with millions of others when the hopes of the era took a dark turn after the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy. We watched as increasingly viscious right-wingers tore blacks from whites, and pitted the middle class against the less privileged -- all the while constructing a predatory U.S. state by and for the crassest of the super rich, and bringing our politics to a shameful nadir that McCain has now embraced, to his ever-lasting shame.

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The Obama-Biden debut in Springfield has just concluded and it is easy to see why Biden is the perfect Vice-presidential choice for this pivotal election. Both men spoke with passion, and their different yet convergent biographies nicely underline the theme of realizing and revitalizing the American dream for all citizens in a tough time, even as we recapture respect for the United States in the world. Their tableau in the home of Lincoln embodies powerful reverberations in the telos of American history.

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