Mandark, even if he's wrong about the actual procedure of reconciliation, his thesis on a number of Dems, including Obama himself, not wanting to actually support the PO, and just put on a show isn't too far off the mark, is it?
No, cause his thesis rests on framing the question as "Do they want a public health insurance option to exist?"* and treating votes and legislative haggling as if they reveal the pure end-state preferences of the people involved. Obama hasn't treated the PO like a primary goal, much less sine qua non for health reform, therefor he must secretly oppose its existence.
Look, every Democrat in the Senate and most of them in the House voted for very similar bills. That doesn't mean this is the bill they all wanted. It means it's the bill they were all willing to settle for, given a bunch of different and overlapping incentives, and what they could guess about each other's behavior. No way does Bernie Sanders imagine an ideal health care distribution system the same way Ben Nelson does, but they both voted Aye.
More likely explanation is that Obama prefers a PO to no PO, but considers it a low priority compared to other aspects of reform, and thus is willing to jettison it for better odds of passing the larger bill. Maybe you disagree with that judgment strongly, but the scenario's a lot simpler than Obama and his corporate masters at AHIP pulling some complicated double-reverse.
For figuring out what all the maneuvering means, I'd recommend
Jonathan Bernstein's blog. I'm gonna keep pimping it here until I see other people quoting his posts.
spoiler (click to show/hide)
*Actually, the question for Greenwald goes something like "Is he one of us, or is he a bad guy?" I'm being kind of mean to him, but the dude is getting deep into the dolchstoss narrative and it grates on me cause I expect him, unlike your average Red State poster, to know better.
