Was this the brilliant plan?

From the NYTimes:

Administration officials, who maintain that Republicans are badly mischaracterizing the legislation that has emerged from three House committees and the Senate health committee, said they had hoped to achieve some level of bipartisan support. (...)

The officials said the White House hoped to make the case to the American people that it was Republicans who had abandoned the effort at bipartisanship. (...)

This week’s careful administration maneuvering on whether a public insurance option was an essential element of any final bill was seemingly part of the new White House effort to find consensus among Democrats, since the public plan has been resisted by moderate and conservative Democrats who could be crucial to winning the votes for passage if no Republicans are on board. (...)

Even as the administration showed some flexibility, angering liberal Democrats who consider a public plan essential, Republicans turned their attacks from the public option to the health care cooperative idea being promoted by some Senate Democrats.

In what Democrats regarded as further evidence that Republicans were not serious about negotiating, Mr. Kyl and Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia, the second-ranking House Republican, described a co-op as a public option carrying another name.

From a Daily Kos diary:

According to CNN, one of the reasons why the Obama administration said what they said about the public option being "optional" this weekend was to see if they could get some of the moderate GOP and moderate Democrats on board. But apparently according to CNN, the GOP made it clear today to White House and the Democrats that they weren't going to participate in Health care reform.

The White House/Democrats will decide to pull the trigger in mid-September.

posted by Quiddity at 8/19/2009 09:05:00 AM