"Obama has governed as a conservative. So, the question for progressives is, “What do we do now?”

[Lydia Leftcoast]

313. And it has been explained to you a thousand times that if Obama had negotiated

from a position of strength, starting by proposing single-payer, talking it up everywhere, getting sympathetic Congresscritters to promote it in their home districts, publicly meeting with single-payer advocates (and shutting out the accursed insurance companies completely--why was it EEEVIL for Cheney to hold closed-door meetings with the energy companies and DOUBLE-PLUS GOOD for Obama to hold closed-door meetings with the insurance vultures?), twisting the arms of the DINOs, and using his bully pulpit to explain the proposal in simple terms, he would have looked better and made it harder for the right-wing to spin the situation.

One reason the right-wing could lie as they did was that there was almost no information about what the proposal actually contained. HR 676 was short and easy to understand. I had to search diligently online to find an executive summary of the Obama proposal, and I finally found one by the Kaiser Foundation.

The nation's rightest were told that we would be getting Soviet-style medicine, while many Democrats I talked to believed that Obama was working on single-payer precisely because of the right-wing lies about Canada and the UK.

Would we have gotten single-payer through a bolder and more open strategy?

Of course not.

But I'd be willing to bet that the compromise position would have been a public option.