Word: carefuls
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...likely to be an ugly summer of sausage-grinding in Washington. Obama's two biggest domestic-policy proposals - health-care reform and alternative energy - will be pulverized and reshaped by the Senate. The end products may be unsightly and counterproductive, if passed. A third initiative - a relatively modest regulatory reform of the financial system - is being chewed to dust by the termite lobbyists of the banking industry. A fourth initiative - the effort to buy off the banking system's "toxic" assets - is languishing, near comatose, because of the bankers' intransigence. (See who's who in Obama's White House...
...convince people that action is necessary on these abstruse issues. He is going to have to demand clear, comprehensible solutions from Congress, and he is going to have to admit what most civilians know in their gut: that a price must be paid for a better, more secure health-care system and action on climate change. This will be easier with the more immediate issue, health-insurance reform. There are compromises that can be made - and Obama should admit that John McCain's plan to tax employer-provided health benefits, at least for wealthier Americans, was a good idea...
...Democrats now have 60 votes in the Senate and a parliamentary tool that gives them the power to pass health-care reform with a simple majority of only 51. That means Republicans are, theoretically at least, powerless to stop President Obama's top domestic priority with a filibuster. So why are Democrats even bothering to keep negotiating with the minority party? Why don't they just pass health-care reform on Democratic votes alone...
...That's the question that many of their allies are asking more and more, as the drive for health-care reform enters a make-or-break month with new signs of problems ahead. The party's liberal base is increasingly insistent that the bill include a strong, government-run public option, like a program similar to Medicare that would serve as an alternative to private insurers. Republicans are calling it a deal killer, which means any bill with a strong government-financed option would necessarily have to go forward without any significant GOP support. But diluting the bill too much...
...will have to decide in the coming weeks whether they are willing to go it alone on health reform or whether they will continue to negotiate with Republicans for a bill that would likely be less expensive and contain far less of a role for government in the health-care system. The chief tool Democrats have for ramming through a bill on their own is something known, incongruously enough, as "reconciliation." It is a parliamentary procedure that protects budget-related measures from a filibuster. (There's yet another possibility: Reid might put the pressure on his own caucus by simply...