And this is one of those moments. This is one of those times where you can honestly say to yourself, doggone it, this is exactly why I came here. This is why I got into politics. This is why I got into public service. This is why I’ve made those sacrifices. Because I believe so deeply in this country and I believe so deeply in this democracy and I’m willing to stand up even when it’s hard, even when it’s tough.

What remains to be seen is whether Democrats in vulnerable swing districts will be moved by the President’s call to reform and to do what is right based on their conscience.

Less significantly but still worth mentioning is that according to unconfirmed reports, the President had no script for this address and instead it was largely adlibed.  In fact, at one point in the full video, you can see that the President was not using a teleprompter.

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Interestingly, the President is not.  According to reports he and the White House are pessimistic  about Health Care making it through the Senate with anything beyond a “trigger option” in which case a public option would only come into affect if economic conditions (especially the price of health care) became severe enough.

By Reid’s count, he believes he is only one or two votes short of a “opt-out” public option which would have states decide if they want to opt-out of the government health care plan.

The President wants to hold on to Senator Olympia Snowe’s vote to be able to say that there is at least the smallest strain of bipartisanship in the bill.  Snowe has said that she is not in favor of a opt-out option but favors the trigger option.  Many see this as the reason why the President won’t push for an opt-out.

The news that Reid is one or two votes short away has sent shock waves through the political community.  Progressives are mad that with a Public Option (even a state opt-out plan) so close to fruition, the President is not pressuring the last few moderate Democrats to come on board with Reid’s plan.  In contrast, Republicans, at least Senator McCain is saying that Health Care is all but a done deal.  The only question in his mind at this point is what form the public option will be included.

My Take: Senator McCain is on the money.  Something’s going to pass, if the President doesn’t get behind Reid’s plan; then it’s going to be something more moderate than most in the progressive community would like to stomach.  The remaining debate is going to be a back and forth between Snowe and moderate Democrats on one side, the White House, and Reid and progressives on the other.  The Republicans are by all intents and purposes on the side line.  While they had a voice before, their only representative is Snowe going forward.

*UPDATE*

This from the  White House Blog

http://climateprogress.org/2009/09/02/a-sea-change-imagine-a-world-without-fish-ocean-acidification-film/

Pretty scary stuff if it continues on its current course.

http://www.forbes.com/2009/09/17/federal-budget-spending-opinions-columnists-bruce-bartlett.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/17/opinion/17wyden.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&ref=opinion&adxnnlx=1253207028-39uAqwjlF34kRcn8vh/ugg

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/18/world/europe/18shield.html?hp

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/09/14/obama-kanye-is-a-jackass_n_286623.html

“I, out of an effort to give Congress the ability to do their thing and not step on their toes, probably left too much ambiguity out there, which allowed then opponents of reform to come in and to fill up the airwaves with a lot of nonsense,” Obama told ABC’s Robin Roberts on “Good Morning America.”

It’s clear that this didn’t work, the White House is going to go 180 degrees on this and get specific tonight.

Imagine next year. Obama has a healthcare plan and a carbon emissions scheme in place, both of which duck some core difficult questions but are still big moves away from the era of George W Bush. His stimulus, designed to kick in with more force in 2010, helps to push an already recovering economy into growth. The troops begin to come back from Iraq in larger numbers. Stocks maintain momentum; banks keep paying back their bailout money, giving the government a profit; and Obama calls a fiscal-responsibility summit to begin to chart a path back to budget sanity.

It won’t turn out that easily, but it’s a plausible scenario. The strategy of pushing much of the stimulus money into an election year was, in retrospect, a shrewd if cynical ploy from Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff. The Democrats will almost certainly lose seats in the Senate in the 2010 mid-term elections, as incumbent parties do, but even in the worst-case (and highly unlikely) scenario, a Republican takeover of the House, Obama’s options are no worse than Clinton’s were in 1994. Clinton, you may recall, failed to get healthcare and yet was re-elected handsomely.

And what will the Republicans be saying then? At some point, they need ideas — yet no ideological heavy lifting is currently being done. Worse, their most credible candidate for 2012, Mitt Romney, enacted a healthcare reform in Massachusetts very similar to Obama’s national plan. How does a party attack a healthcare reform when its own candidate endorsed just such a scheme in his own state?

Well, I guess they can run Sarah Palin or Dick Cheney. But Obama has already defeated both of them. He took his time this summer, hung back and let his enemies do their worst. They did. He took a beating. But, as with the Clintons and John McCain during the election campaign, he survived their tactical hits by retaining a strategic cunning. He still has it. Whether he can retain it is what the next year will tell us.

Healthcare has to get passed for this scenario to come to fruition.  I do believe the economy will turn around though, with or without healthcare.  However, passing healthcare will largely determine our future economic course.