Did the G.O.P. tip its hand too early in the health care debate?

[Updated below]

[Update II]

During last year’s presidential campaign, Time magazine ran a piece that attempted to provide insights into the personalities of John McCain and Barack Obama by examining their chosen games of vice. McCain’s game, craps, is one where the outcome is, to a large extent, determined by chance. Craps involves little strategy. You have to go with your gut. You have to ride the hot hand. It can pay off big if you’re lucky, but it can also blow up in your face when you’re not.

Barack Obama, on the other hand, is a poker player. The players in a poker game, in contrast to those who play craps, actually have a great deal of control over the outcome of a given hand, which depends in part on chance, but in part on strategy as well. A snippet about Obama from the Time article:

He studied the cards as closely as he would an eleventh-hour amendment to a bill. The odds were religion to him. Only rarely did he bluff. “He had a pretty good idea about what his chances were,” says Denny Jacobs, a former state senator from East Moline.

Given where we currently stand in the health care debate, I wonder if we’ve just watched the poker player pull off one his rare bluffs by giving the appearance of changing his position on the public option. I think the Republicans, instead of having the White House hoping for a good draw on the flop, may have just lost the hand.

What’s my evidence? Follow along, dear reader:

Exhibit A: Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) – Grassley is the senatorial point man for Republicans on health care reform. Until fairly recently, he seemed at least vaguely committed to the idea of working in a bipartisan manner with the rest of the Senate Finance Committee as a member of the self-proclaimed centrists in the “Gang of Six” to reach some sort of deal that was generally agreeable to all parties.

But then came the “death panels”.

Now, it’s been proven that what former Gov. Sarah Palin wrote on her Facebook page (an aside: think for second about how unserious our political discourse has become when a Facebook posting can dominate the national debate for over two weeks) is verifiably false. Some respected Republicans even pushed back against the claim.

Sadly, though, Chuck Grassley didn’t get the memo and started hyping the claim at town hall events he hosted back in Iowa last week, saying to his constituents that “you have every right to fear” that the government was coming to kill your grandmother. That he was both forced to (quietly) admit that there was no truth to the “death panels” attack and was also (quietly) exposed as a hypocrite on the issue should not go unmentioned.

The larger point, though, is that Grassley is not willing to play ball. I don’t have a sense of Mr. Grassley’s business acumen, but one does not generally get very far by calling your negotiating partners “intellectually dishonest”, nor does one get very far on a compromise bill when they’re not willing to compromise. As MSNBC’s First Read put it, “In short, Grassley says he’s willing to walk away from legislation in which he gets everything he wants.”

That is not a credible partner.

Exhibit B: The attacks on the co-op plan – As liberals groused that the White House was throwing the public option under the bus, attention started to turn to a proposal that might be able to garner more bipartisan support: the co-op. (Not sure what a co-op is? Me neither, but this may help you learn a bit more). Many on the left feel that the co-ops won’t have the size needed to force insurance companies to deal, but there’s also good reason to believe that the public option may have faced some of the same problems.

In any event, the co-ops represent a deep compromise for liberals (even if it’s not really the key element of reform), but even that apparently won’t be able to draw any support from Republicans. Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) said on August 18 that the co-op is just a “Trojan horse”; a public option by another name. Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) attacked the idea of the co-ops in strikingly similar language. In short, no matter what the Democrats or the White House propose, they’re not going to be willing able to forge a bipartisan consensus. The G.O.P. is not going to approve of any reform.

Things would appear to be fairly bleak, then, for the president. He’s got liberals threatening to derail his plans if there’s no public option and the conservatives are not going to play ball no matter what, so where does that leave the Obama?

I suspect exactly where he wanted to be.

Let’s be honest about what’s happened recently. While the town halls have certainly been lively and gotten a lot of attention, I’ve yet to see evidence that any lawmaker has been persuaded to change their vote based on the public outcry. That may be because the politicians feel fairly safe by virtue of their electoral prospects or perhaps because they just feel that they’re right, but whatever the reason, the rowdiness at the events seems to have actually caused many lawmakers to harden their resolve in regards to passing a bill.

August is a “dead month” in terms of the actual legislation of the bill, and while there’s been a noticeable weakening of the president’s poll numbers and lowered expectations about health care reform in general, when the public is presented with the particulars of Obama’s plans, a majority of Americans seem inclined to support them.

And now we see today that Democrats are considering going it alone on the bill because of a lack of conservative support. Liberal bloggers Atrois and Steve Bennen believe that this should have been apparent a long time ago. Atrois writes:

I wonder if we’ll ever know what these people were really thinking. The “Republicans don’t want to pass anything” point was painfully obviously true months ago. So what was the point of all of this crap?

The point, if I may venture a guess, was to provide cover for Obama to get to a place where the White House could say, with supporting evidence, that they tried really, really hard to come to some sort of bipartisan deal, but that the G.O.P. just didn’t want to work with them.

Honestly, what’s been lost at this point? I’d say nothing. Because the president has always been ambivalent about the public option, it can now be more or less back on the table since there’s no need to negotiate it away to placate the opposition*. Liberals now can work to build a bill they like (though I’m not at all convinced that they would have voted down a health care bill that hit the floor without a public option). The controversial provision that lead to the “death panels” nonsense? It might stay out of the bills for the sake of p.r., but it could easily go back in. There was, in other words, a superficial skirmish over things that are still in play. Since one side decided to go all in on moving targets as though they represented the entire legislation even though that’s not in fact the case, they showed their hand. By announcing so vocally their intention to deep six any reforms, the GOP effectively gave Obama the cards he needed to draw a flush. He’s now free to do whatever he needs to do.

It will be interesting to see if the reporting around this issue changes now that we seem to have reached a tipping point of sorts. The media narrative has been obsessed with the notion of bipartisan talks. Now that they seem to have broken down for good, there is an opening for re-framing the debate. Will it be “Dems ram through health care over conservative objections?” or “GOP attempts to stop aggressive liberal legislation?” Stay tuned.

(* The only thing at this point that really stands in the way of the Democrats not passing a bill are the conservative Democrats in the Senate, none of whom have gone on the record as willing to vote in support of a filibuster should the bill come up for a vote).

[Update]

Now that the Dems are threatening to walk away, Sen. Grassley wants back in the sandbox.

[Update II]

Yet another wrinkle…Democrats are considering breaking the health care bill into two different pieces to move it through the Senate. I’m not sure if this hurts or helps my thesis, but it’s certainly a bold (or perhaps, futile) gambit.