Stay Flexible and Find the Sweet Spot

Norm Ornstein, a center-right policy analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, considers the Obama administration to have approached this health care reform in a saavy way. Here's the heart of his analysis:

How to prevail under these difficult circumstances? The only realistic way
was to avoid a bill of particulars, to stay flexible, and to rely on
congressional party and committee leaders in both houses to find the sweet spots
to get bills through individual House and Senate obstacle courses. Under these
circumstances, the best intervention from the White House is to help break
impasses when they arise and, toward the end, the presidential bully pulpit and
the president's political capital can help to seal the deal.

No health reform bill can be enacted unless the House and Senate
each pass a version, and that has been the single-minded goal of the White
House. If the Senate has to resort to reconciliation, it can only work if more
than 50 Democrats are convinced that it is the last resort -- that every effort
was made to compromise to include significant Republican support. Thus, the
White House signal on the public option. Once both houses pass versions, no
matter how disparate, a conference committee can find a way to meld the bills --
no doubt with heavy White House input -- into one plan that goes back to each
house for up or down votes. There, the pressure on lawmakers to support health
reform will be much greater, as will the ability to break filibusters by urging
all Democrats, even if they can't support a bill, to vote for cloture as a
procedural issue.