I'm not here beating the drum for not passing the Senate bill.

The Speaker of the House of Representatives has said, in no uncertain terms, that she can not pass the Senate bill without a reconciliation fix that eliminates the excise tax.

That is the unions talking.

A pragmatic person with a grasp of the political realities would realize that the precious excise tax has to be gutted if you want the Senate health bill to pass.

It is as simple as that.

So, passing nothing is failure.

If so, whaddaya think?

One theme: First mistake, instead of remaining a force after the lection, they turned OFA over to the DNC...

As a candidate swept into office by a grass-roots revolution of his own creation, Obama was poised to reinvent Washington politics, just as he had reinvented the modern political campaign. Obama and his team hadn't simply collected millions of e-mail addresses, they had networked activists, online and off -- often down to the street level. By the end of the campaign, Obama's top foot soldiers were more than volunteers. They were seasoned organizers, habituated to the hard work of reaching out to neighbors and communicating Obama's vision for change.

As president, Obama promised to use technology to open up the halls of power and keep the American people involved. "If you want to know how I'll govern," he said, "just look at our campaign." His activists wouldn't just be cheerleaders; they would be partners in delivering on his mandate, serving as the most fearsome whip Washington had ever seen. "At the end of the campaign, we entered into an implied contract with Obama," says Marta Evry, who served as a regional field organizer in California for the campaign. "He was going to fight for change, and we were going to fight with him."

The problems started before Obama was even elected. While his top advisers worked for months to carefully plot out a transition to governing, their plan to institutionalize its campaign apparatus was as ill-considered as George Bush's invasion of Iraq. "There was absolutely no transition planning," says Micah Sifry, the co-founder of techPresident, a watchdog group that just published a special report on OFA's first year. In what Sifry decries as a case of "criminal political negligence," Obama's grass-roots network effectively went dark for two months after Election Day, failing to engage activists eager for their new marching orders. "The movement moment," he says, "was lost."

It is pathetic to me that so many "pragmatic" Villagers do not understand this elementary principle of politics.

I repeated questioned whether hcr could work at the national level, but I don't remember any inside the blogway luminaries warning that if Feingold was against this kind of sweeping reform several years ago, the legislation might be premature.

The left bought into the 'we're all on the same team' bs early, and continued to stay on side well after it was clear that the big, early Wall St. and big healchcare money was also part of the team.

So, guess which part of the team Obama listens to?