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The fate of pending U.S. health-care legislation -- and its political impact next year -- likely hangs on one simple question: Will Democrats conclude they are better off passing a highly controversial bill than passing nothing at all?

Most likely, the answer to that question is yes.

At this stage in the sausage-making process that is writing legislation, nobody is under the illusion he or she is working on anything like the perfect health bill, or one that is growing in popularity. A series of recent polls shows the opposite -- that support is eroding the longer the bill hangs in the balance.

Which presents Democrats, broadly speaking, with a gut-level decision: to push across the finish line, or, alternately, to take advantage of multiple opportunities that will be made available in the next two weeks to pull the plug instead.

Be sure to read the whole thing, but Seib is betting that the Dems press on for their crippled vision, thereby crippling Medicare in the process, because "most Democratic leaders have concluded that, as a political matter, something beats nothing."

Perhaps, but as the evidence grows that this bill is a disaster for the nation's elderly --see the report of the Office of the Actuary which most of the MSM is studiously ignoring--  folks like Senator James Webb who were elected because of a deep commitment to fixing politics are being asked to brand themselves forever as the decisive vote for this mess.  If Webb --or Ben Nelson, or Blanche Lincoln or Evan Bayh or Joe Lieberman-- vote for cloture, they are voting to devastate the lives of millions of senior citizens by carving a half trillion out of Medicare.  And they will be doing that for the false vision of cost control and an admittedly imperfect extension of coverage to far less than the universe of those without coverage today?

Given the savaging that Joe Lieberman took yesterday and all weekend long for his stand against the insane attempt to open the already functionally insolvent Medicare to millions more enrollees at 55 and older, it would take require enormous courage for one or more Democrats to say "no" at this point, and "back to the drawing board." 

But this is the sort of society-changing vote that might just cause one or more of these four senators to do just that.  The switchboard is 202-224-3121.  Call Senators Webb of Virginia, Lincoln of Arkansas, Nelson of Nebraska, and Bayh of Indiana and urge a "no" vote on cloture.

Then go to the box on the right marked "Free Our health Care" and hit the "Take Further Action" button to register your opinion with your home state senators and congressman.

Finally, start preparing the ground for the battle in the House if the Senate does move this mess forward.  The only way to peel away votes from Nancy Pelosi's machine will be to signal certain political defeat for House Democrats on the bubble.  The best way to do that is with a donation to ReverseTheVote.org which is targeting 24 Democrats who voted for Obamacare on the last go-around.  If a handful of these can be turned, Obamacare can be stopped in the House.  Please send a message to these two dozen Dems with a generous contribution and then urge your friends to do the same.

I think one answer here is that Lieberman isn't actually all that smart. He speaks, and seems to think, exclusively in terms of generalities and broad statements of principle. But there's little evidence that he's a sharp or clear thinker, and certainly no evidence that he knows or cares about the details of health care reform. At one point during the 2000 recount, the Gore campaign explained to Lieberman why lowering standards for military ballots would be totally unfair and illegal, and Lieberman proceeded to go on television and subvert the campaign's position. Gore loyalists interpreted this as a sellout, but perhaps the more plausible explanation was that Lieberman -- who, after all, badly wanted to be vice-President -- just didn't understand the details of the Gore position well enough to defend it. The guy was taken apart by Dick Cheney in the 2000 veep debate.

I suspect that Lieberman is the beneficiary, or possibly the victim, of a cultural stereotype that Jews are smart and good with numbers. Trust me, it's not true. If Senator Smith from Idaho was angering Democrats by spewing uninformed platitudes, most liberals would deride him as an idiot. With Lieberman, we all suspect it's part of a plan. I think he just has no idea what he's talking about and doesn't care to learn. Lieberman thinks about politics in terms of broad ideological labels. He's the heroic centrist voice pushing legislation to the center. No, Lieberman doesn't have any particular sense of what the Medicare buy-in option would do to the national debt. If the liberals like it, then he figures it's big government and he should oppose it. I think it's basically that simple.

“The economic mess we inherited”
by Clark S. Judge, managing director, White House Writers Group, Inc.

On Sunday, Rasmussen reported amazing nineteen-point negative gap between President Obama’s strong favorable (23%) and strong unfavorable ratings (42%) among likely voters.  In polling terms this deficit is almost as big as the trillion-dollar-plus one in his 2010 budget.  To it, the president and administration have one response, repeated last night in his interview with Oprah Winfrey and summarized in five words: “The economic mess we inherited.”
 
But upon assuming office did he and his administration find an economic crisis that needed mending – or one for which everything had already been done that needed to be done to bring about a recovery?  And if the latter, have their policies made things better or worse?
 
In February I argued (see here: http://tiny.cc/N0Cgu <http://tiny.cc/N0Cgu>  ) that a few simple calculations derived from Milton Friedman’s quantity theory of money pointed to an economic recovery beginning between May and September, as in fact happened.  
 
The basic argument was that in early 2008 the United States had seen unprecedented destruction of a new kind of base money, that which was incorporated in structured financings rather than bank reserves.  We were in the first bank run of the non-bank bank era.   Not until September did the Federal Reserve and Treasury respond with adequate vigor.  But in the last third of the year their massive injections of funds into the economy and the banking system were sufficient to offset what had been lost in the first third.
 
As of February, the danger was that the Obama Administration could dampen or reverse this coming upturn.  How?  By injecting new risk and uncertainty into the economy through, for example, mandating trade protection, increasing tax rates, diverting resources from productive private investment to uneconomical government-sponsored activities, intruding in the management of major industries, or harassing and prosecuting business people to make populist political points.
 
The measure of when an economy takes on increased risk is simple: lenders will lend fewer dollars for each dollar of reserves.
 
This is exactly what is happening now – and it will continue to happen for as long as the administration continues to drive the nation towards unimaginable levels of spending and deficits, makes the government debt crisis worse through its health care overhaul including through aggravating the Medicare crisis by adding millions more to the unfunded program’s rolls, piles new regulations and controls onto the economy and financial system, and bludgeons bankers and businesspeople to act against their considered judgment.
 
The president’s weekend talk about fat cat businessmen and his likely follow up performance when he and his team meet today to beat up bankers to lending more liberally could only make things worse.
 
It is also a negative when he talks about the immense swings in the economy in the decades before he took office.  Economists term those decades the “Great Moderation” because recessions were mild and short-lived and growth was steady.  To people making investment judgments based in part on whether Administration policy makes sense or not, such obvious ignorance or dissembling suggests a White House the does not care about economic reality, even enough to get recent history right.
 
Karl Rove argues that part of what is driving the Administration’s collapse in the polls is their choice of subjects.  The president talks about health care and global warming when the American people are worried about jobs, taxes, and economic growth.  On one level Rove is surely right.  Mr. Obama may win points by saying he inherited a bad economy, but he immediately loses them when he focuses on policies like health overhaul that few believe have anything to do with solving our economic problems. Still, something more is going on.
 
For a president who ran on forward-looking themes of hope and change, Mr. Obama sounds amazingly stuck in the past, in FDR’s 1930s. Yet, attitudes have changed in seven decades.  James Farley’s formulate for winning elections – “tax, tax, tax, spend, spend, spend, elect, elect, elect” – is a nonstarter today.  A clue to how much of a nonstarter was in Rasmussen’s Sunday report, which observed, “Among those who consider fiscal policy issues the most important, just 1% Strongly Approve [of how the president is doing his job] and 81% Strongly Disapprove.”  It has been clear for several years that Independents are particularly concerned about fiscal issues and that losing Independents is the major reason for Mr. Obama’s fall in the polls.
 
So “the economic mess he inherited” doesn’t work as an excuse when a large segment of the American people see the Obama policies as making things worse, much worse. And here is the bigger problem for the president: those people are right.  
 
It is an old political adage: if you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.  It doesn’t look as though the Obama Administration will heed that advice anytime soon.