Well yes, it isn't like he has been campaigning or fund raising or talking about health care anywhere that the public could see him.

   If Bush was the "decider", Obama is going to end up being nick-named the 'un-decider'.  The last thing he wants to do is to publicly state in an emphatic way that this, that or the other thing is indispensable.  For Obama, the over-riding priority is an ability to define "success" in a way that can mean anything.  That way, whatever happens, unless it's just absolutely impossible to put lip-stick on it, he can call it success and claim it for his own.

   Those here who are regular apologists for a now-Byzantine system of legislative politics, and who defend what we have because, above all, they don't believe anything else is possible, will readily accept and defend this attitude of the president---after all, they aren't in Congress and don't have to live in constant doubt about what the meaning of 'is' is.

   The "public option" and the "Opt-Out" plan

   In the ranks of the Republicans, there's no such uncertainty.  They know and say what they want or don't want in this case.  They don't want a public health insurance plan at all.  That is, they're against the "public option" and are going to vote against a bill that includes one.

   About the "Opt-out" plan, it reminds me of the sliced and re-packaged "mortgage-backed securities" which were made up of sub-prime home loans but enjoyed favorable ratings from the investment ratings agencies.  In fact, the financial investments industries and the catastrophe they were allowed to cook up and produce are, for me, a perfect analogy for the insanity now prevailing in national politics.  Any people who can have found nothing to worry about regarding the high-jacking of corporate finance by people who make casino-owners look as staid and conservative as insurance company executives, are thoroughly ripe for what prevails and has so long prevailed in Washington.

   How many states in the nation now have a respectable alternative to the hideous industry-standard health-care system?  The leading example is Massachusetts, with Hawaii coming in with a very weak version which might one day develop into something a little more like what people all over the U.S. have so long and so desperately wanted---universal, single-payer health care which is transferable and cannot be rejected at the whims of for-profit management.

   Now, what has been stopping just any state from devising and instituting its own public non-profit single-payer health care program?   In practical terms, besides the state's population size posing a problem in mustering a sufficiently-large risk pool, there is no obstacle other than the main one which has accounted for the decades-long defeat of a national single-payer non-profit plan: the private for-profit health industries themselves who can do (and have done) at state legislatures and governors' offices the same work they routinely do in Washington.

   Thus, it's not very hard to figure out that, if things are left in the hands of the various states, those with either populations too small for a private non-profit program's risk-pool, or those which are by tradition thoroughly conservative politically, (and these are in many cases both true in a given state, often rural and sparsely populated), won't be likely to remain in any national public option program.  Everywhere else, we're going to see more rounds of David versus Goliath (wherein, unlike the Biblical tale, "Goliath" slaughters "David").

   And, this, in our Brave New World of "Change You Can Believe In," is called "progress".  Anything, anything rather than attack the problems which have destroyed the risk of a meaningful democratic system's coming into existence.---even as a dual-track effort in which, in addition to working through the hopelessly broken system as it exists, there is also a developed and coherent program to produce, step by step, over the years which shall be required for them, to repair and replace that broken system with something significantly better.