NP: Genius playlist from

A lot of what I've read about the health care debate seems to miss the forest for the trees in a big way. The day-to-day stuff is maddening and not necessarily of any relevance to anyone except the 24-hour news networks. The White House might go so far as to say it's entirely an invention of those news networks. Joe Klein tries to take a look at the forest from a branch of one of those trees, but, extending the metaphor, Nate Silver does him one better and looks at the whole damn ecosystem. His closing is worth quoting in its entirety:

Now, let me pause here and stipulate how easy it is to play Monday Morning Quarterback. Obama passed one of the largest spending bills in history, a lot of which was directed toward traditionally liberal priorities. He's gotten farther on universal health care than any President has in the last 50 years and may well still get across the finish line. If a public-option-less bill passes the Congress, then liberals have every right to critique it as a matter of policy. But as a matter of politics, it will have been an enormous accomplishment.

For my money, the problem has not been that Obama is insufficiently committed to the progressive cause (which, by the way, is not necessarily his job). Nor is it that he's tried to ram liberal policies down the country's throat. Almost all of of the reforms that the Democrats have been advancing -- the stimulus, health care, global warming regulation, etc. -- began as fairly popular programs (although they didn't necessarily end up they once the Congress got done with them). Rather, it's that in trying to split the difference between these two extremes, he's sometimes failed to make the tough choices that define successful Presidencies. Obama will probably get this figured out -- in fact, he'll almost certainly get it figured out by 2012 (take a look at where Reagan and Clinton were at this point in their first terms). But if Democrats want to survive 2010 and the health care debate largely intact, he will need to do so sooner rather than later.

I especially agree with the part about how Obama will learn more and more about how to thread this particular needle. If we've learned anything from him so far as a candidate and as a President, it's that he adapts well, even after a misstep.

This hints that Silver supports the second possible explanation from his colleague Tom Schaller, who opines about what has happened with Obama's political capital, an explanation that Schaller thinks is maybe too charitable. Then again, maybe both Silver and I see Obama's moves through a Chicago lens, and have a different view of the end game.

Then again, this could ascribe value to the day-to-day wrangling I was complaining about earlier, as several people have commented on the strong tagline Obama and his people came up with at the end of his New York Times op-ed. This some of what resonates with me about this administration, in that Obama looks like someone who needs collaboration to make his ideas stronger. This is very similar to how I like to work, and the disconnect comes when you're dealing with people who are used to getting a final, finished product instead of something that's still in development.