Chait, is the gate "wide open"?

Jonathan Chait has argued since the darkest dog days of August that inexorable political logic will ultimately lead the Democrats to pass a comprehensive health care reform bill. Serial resurrections of the bill have seemed to confirm Chait's perspicuity.  I hope and pray that he's right.  But I fear that at this point he is underestimating the the tenuousness of the effort to get across the goal line. And I fear that the public option boomlet may cause a fumble.

Chait makes it all sound so easy...

Some of us realized all along that there was no rational reason that the Massachusetts election had to kill health care reform. Fundamentally, the main barrier -- getting sixty votes in the Senate -- had already been crossed. The remaining obstacles are puny. All the Democrats needed to do was have the House pass the Senate bill. If they insisted on changes, most of those could easily be made through reconciliation, which only requires a majority vote in the Senate...the legislative door to health care reform is wide open, and Democrats simply need to walk through it...it's fairly easy to just have the House pass the Senate bill, then use reconciliation to eliminate the Nebraska Medicaid subsidy and change the mix of taxes that pay for new coverage.

"Wide open" is quite a stretch. It's far from "fairly easy to just have the House pass the Senate bill."  The House passed its own bill 220-215 in November and has since lost 3 votes - Murtha through death, Wexler through resignation, and Cao through reversal.  That bill only squeezed through because the Stupak Amendment brought 28 blue dogs aboard. Passing the Senate bill means abjuring the Stupak Amendment.  Perhaps the more conservative nature of the Senate bill will add a few more blue dogs -- if the booming movement to include the public option in the reconciliation package doesn't hit critical mass. On the other side of the Hill, no one seems to know whether a negotiated reconciliation patch can capture 51 votes.

The door seems as about as wide open as the eye of a needle for a camel.

Related posts:
The earth beneath their feet: Obama recasts health care reform
Aghanistan redux: Obama's HCR surge
Obama picks "none of the above" again
A gallon of water at bedtime for bedwetters: Obama's HCR prescription
How Obama will -- and won't -- lead on health care

Who Says Cheney isn't Pole-Driven?

A relaxed Dick Cheney in shirtsleeves, “his big chair swiveled” toward the target, took quite a stick to his Democratic opponents in a testosterone-charged pas de deux with Politico this week.

The lede gets all-to-quickly to the upshot:

Vice President Cheney warned in an interview Wednesday that a premature withdrawal from Iraq would invite “further attacks” against the United States and said he has been surprised by the weakness of the Democratic Congress.

Cheney fingers Dingell and Murtha as representatives (d) of this ‘weakness’:

[Dingell] and Murtha “and the other senior leaders … march to the tune of Nancy Pelosi to an extent I had not seen, frankly, with any previous speaker,” Cheney said. “I’m trying to think how to say all of this in a gentlemanly fashion, but [in] the Congress I served in, that wouldn’t have happened.”

...When asked if these men had lost their spines, he responded, “They are not carrying the big sticks I would have expected.”

Hmm...weaklings with small sticks, at least one of whom would force a premature withdrawal if he were more potent. That would be a pity, with consummation nigh:

We’re sort of halfway through the surge, in a sense. We’ll be going back to pre-surge levels over the course of the next year.”

Fortunately, the would-be withdrawers need not be stymied for long. Our premature-predictor-in-chief assures us that a “self-governing democracy [will] be firmly established in Iraq” by January 2009.

And if the U.S. can’t surge to that swift and satisfying conclusion, other enemies are poised to stick it to us. Take Iran, with its hot pursuit of superpower status:

“The long pole in the tent in terms of developing nuclear weapons, traditionally, historically, has been developing fissile material.”

It'll take a big stick to keep that long pole out of the nuclear end zone.

In any case, it’s reassuring to know that our avuncular veep does not demand perfection, or absolute power. Counterinsurgent NIEs, images of soldiers holding naked prisoners on leashes, news of destroyed torture videos—it’s alll in term’s work:

“Everything leaks,” he said with a chuckle.

That's why there's no safety in premature withdrawal.