Baucus: Public Option Not Likely to Survive

I'd like to know the answer to that, too. His plan was reasonable but it seems he didn't even want to talk about it in the committee. Nothing I've heard that's going on in there relates to it. I'm 60 years old; his plan would have helped me. Now I feel like I've been thrown to the dogs. There is no help for people my age and even the fantasy public option won't help because of it's effective date.

Unless you think the Baucus and Kent Conrad and Ben Nelson and Mary Landrieu or the Wal-Mart twins are right wingers, the problem is not the GOP, it's Senate members of our own party. It's also the nature of the Senate in general. The Senate is the place where legislation goes to either die or get watered down so much that it's worthless. It's good at giving the president the approval to blow stuff up or at passing reactionary BS like the Patriot Act - but other than that, it's difficult to get change through that body. The only times it can be made to work is when you have a guy like LBJ twisting arms, threatening, cutting deals, etc. But Harry Reid is about as far from LBJ as you can get. Obama is no LBJ either. Heck, even Ted mostly followed a "I'll take what I can get" approach.

Most of the Dem opposition is coming from more conservative Senators from small (in terms of population) states and from states where Obama is about as popular as Hitler...for obvious reasons. (Arkansas, Louisiana) The public option may be popular overall but it isn't where these folks live...and it is these Dem votes - or lack of - that are going to kill the public option. Ben Nelson, Max Baucus, Kent Conrad, Mary Landrieu, etc, aren't going to lose re-election because they oppose or don't push for the public option. And because there aren't very many true progressives in the places where these folks live, they don't worry all that much about pissing us off. Chuck Schumer represents many, many, many more people than Kent Conrad but their votes count for the same. Like it or not, it's the way our founders set this system up. (well, almost....Senators were originally selected by state legislatures and not via direct vote)

Now, the 60 vote threshold is a creation of the Senate itself and can be changed. And there's reconciliation. But few Senators of either party will want to get rid of the filibuster altogether and my guess is that the WH has gamed this out and figured that reconciliation just isn't a politically feasible route to take.

It sucks, but the reality is that the WH and Senate leadership aren't caving to the right wingers - they are caving in to members of their own party. I'd bet it would be easier to get somebody like Olympia Snowe or Susan Collins on board (they are popular in Maine because they are moderate and a more progressive stance on healthcare reform would be acceptable to and welcomed by many of their constituents) than it would be to get Ben Nelson or Landrieu on the public option wagon. But if you get the ladies from Maine, you lose folks like Nelson, Landrieu, the Senators from Wal-Mart, maybe Conrad, and likely Joe Lieberman, who is again using every opportunity he gets to stab the party he caucuses with in the back. And if you lose more Dem votes than the GOP votes you gain (let's face it, two GOP votes are the most we'll get...if that), you still can't get to 60.

Sadly, we can yell and scream all we want and say we're going to stay home in 2010 if there is no public option. The results, however, will likely be the loss of some good folks in the Senate and the House while people like Conrad and Nelson and Baucus retain their jobs.