President Obama has been desperate to ditch the public option for weeks. Max Baucus did the job he thought he was supposed to do -- memorialize the deals that the White House cut with health care industry stakeholders. He left it to the White House to sell it, and now they have to.
But every time they tried to jettison the public option through surrogates like Kathleen Sebelius or "senior White House officials" speaking anonymously to media outlets, the base went haywire and Obama's poll numbers started tanking.
Well, now that Baucus has delivered his stenography, gotta get the base on board with the "goody bag" of benefits -- which basically means whatever was left over after Rahm Emanuel got done auctioning off the rest to the medical industrial complex.
So the new DNC ad fires up the "base" by trying to rally them around hatred of teabaggers:
Because hatred of teabaggers will, I guess, mean that nobody notices that Obama makes no mention of a public option in the ad:
It's meant to primarily signal our most ardent supporters and the base of the Democratic Party that we are with you -- and that we need you -- to get this done and accomplish the other big things this president has set out to do," DNC communications director Brad Woodhouse said.
Well, now there's the rub. Because it turns out that 44% of Democrats strongly support health care reform with a public option, but that figure drops to 12% without one. So passing the Baucus bill means stabbing the base and destroying 2010 turnout for the midterms, which is pretty much what NAFTA did in 1994 -- when there was a 54 seat swing to the Republicans.
Thank Rahm Emanuel for that one, too.
It looks like Obama's speech in College Park, Maryland the other day on health care also served as a spectacular photo-op, allowing the DNC to flood the air waves with "fired up, ready to go!" ads supporting generic health care reform.
I think they left out one key moment of the Maryland event:
That's the one where the crowd openly boos the Baucus bill.