The American Pundit

I’m not quite sure what’s secret about the fact that Barack Obama wants the government to force private insurance companies out and put government in charge of health care, but whatever.

Perhaps it’s just news because he’s officially been conveniently ambiguous on the issue so as to appear the moderate option. How anyone can still see Obama as moderate at this point in comparison to anyone to the right of Karl Marx is beyond me. Note to the world: He’s not even your typical liberal. The man who admits to seeking out Marxist friends in college is socialist.

But now, senior administration officials are holding private meetings almost daily at the Capitol with senior Democratic staff to discuss ways to include a version of the public plan in the health care bill that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., plans to bring to the Senate floor later this month, according to senior Democratic congressional aides…

At the same time, Obama has been reaching out personally to rank-and-file Senate Democrats, telephoning more than a dozen lawmakers in the last week to press the case for action…

“The challenge is to go to the (Senate) floor, hold the deal,” said Steve Elmendorf, a lobbyist who was chief of staff to former House Democratic leader Dick Gephardt. But “they are more involved than people think. They have a plan and a strategy, and they know what they want to get and they work with people to get it.”…

He has met repeatedly in private with Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, who has floated a proposal to allow states to set up government plans as a fallback if commercial insurers do not control premiums.

He’s doing it secretly because he knows how terribly unpopular government-run health care is with the public and he doesn’t want to expend whatever political capital he has left on an issue destined to be politically disastrous. Hence his work behind the scenes.

I doubt that strategy will work. He’s not going to avoid taking blame for the passage of socialized health care just because he didn’t publicly declare strong and unbridled support for the “public option” between January 20th and whenever the monstrosity passes. Not only will he as president have to sign the socialized system into law, but he’s already on record supporting the government takeover of health care. When Americans come looking for someone to blame, they’re not going segregate said blame between those who publicly pushed for it in Congress and the guy who’s on record not only supporting such a system in the past but putting his signature on the final legislation.

Unless he doesn’t count on the proposals ever actually passing, in which case he can tell influential Democrats that he worked behind the scenes as hard as he could, while he avoids publicly looking like an architect of failed socialized health care proposals. I doubt that’ll float with progressive activists who demand nothing less than full-throated support of socialist policies, however.

Hopefully he’ll be as successful in winning passage of socialized health care as he was in securing the Olympic games for Chicago. Which is to say, hopefully he’ll fail miserably.