Cool whip

Begging your indulgence, dear reader, an updated reposting from earlier this week:
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Ever since Scott Brown's election on Jan. 19 seemingly blew the Democratic caucus into pieces, Nancy Pelosi has been a rock. While acknowledging some tactical uncertainty in the immediate aftermath, she never wavered in her assurance that Democrats would find a way to pass comprehensive reform.

On Jan. 21, she caused some anguish by acknowledging that she did not have the votes to pass the Senate bill as is. She did glance at the possibility of piecemeal reform. But the dominant chord even then was that a path to meaningful reform would be found. Note the refusal to panic:

"There's a recognition that there's a foundation in that bill [the Senate bill] that's important. So one way or another those areas of agreement that we have will have to be advanced, whether it's by passing the Senate bill with any changes that can be made, or just taking [pieces of it]," Pelosi said.

"We have to get a bill passed -- we know that. That's a predicate that we all subscribe to."

When will that happen? Who knows!

"We're in no rush," Pelosi said.

On Jan. 28, she took heart from Obama's defense of comprehensive reform in the State of the Union address and responded to his call to Congress to get it passed:

“You go through the gate. If the gate’s closed, you go over the fence. If the fence is too high, we’ll pole-vault in. If that doesn’t work, we’ll parachute in. But we’re going to get health care reform passed for the American people.”

A health care strategy in Obama's pregnant pause?

Two days ago, I started a post in which I was planning to contrast this intrepid declaration by Nancy Pelosi with what I viewed as mixed messages from Obama:

"You go through the gate. If the gate's closed, you go over the fence. If the fence is too high, we'll pole-vault in. If that doesn't work, we'll parachute in. But we're going to get health care reform passed for the American people."

Paraphrasing Steve Benen, I wrote, "Compare Pelosi's strength and determination with the ambiguity emanating from Barack "identify those core elements of this package" Obama" (Benen's comparison was with Mary Landrieu).  The epithet came from Obama's Jan. 20 interview with George Stephanopoulos, in which the President had seemed to me to be pulling in two directions -- first suggesting that a health care bill might have to be stripped down to win some Republican support, and then explaining why the core elements of the bill could not be pulled apart.

But a funny thing happened on the way to "publish post."  I reread the interview, searching for the wording for my epithet, and began to think I had misread it the first time.  That's partly Obama's fault; his language was unclear.  But his thinking at that point was, I think, completely consistent with his presentation of the health care reform task in the State of the Union address a week later. In both cases, he studiously avoiding speaking as a tactical party leader. He gestured toward one more reach-out to Republicans.  He left the door open to picking up a Senate Republican vote or two and therefore going back to negotiating a merged Senate-House bill, rather than trying to navigate the much messier process of the House passing the Senate bill and negotiating fixes to be achieved through reconciliation.

But also in both, he asserted that the HCR bill had been misrepresented, that its key parts were interdependent,  and that a full-scale bill must be passed. In the interview, when he said, " I would advise that we try to move quickly to coalesce around those elements of the package that people agree on," he was not talking about a scaled-down package. "People" may have nominally included Republicans (or not nominally, if he thinks that his own advocacy may pull in a Republican or two). But essentially, Obama meant that Democrats need to recognize that the core elements in both bills cannot be pulled apart, and that they therefore need to find a way to negotiate or live with whatever parts of the bill they find objectionable and get the core elements -- i.e., in all likelihood, the Senate bill -- passed.