Reid vs Obama Drama Not So Dramatic

D.C. loves nothing more than insider intrigue about closed-door meetings. Exhibit A: TPM's Brian Beutler is stirring the pot with his reporting that last week's White House health-care meeting between the president and Senators Reid and Schumer was more acrimonious than we've been led to believe. Days after the meeting Reid announced the inclusion of a public option in his health-care bill, amid speculation that the White House still favored a trigger option. Beutler writes that in the days leading up to the meeting, relations between Reid and the administration inched toward the breaking point. His sources describe "the back and forth between Senate health-care principals and the White House as a "sort of stare-down where the two sides were saying, 'you be the face of pulling it out.' Reid wants Obama to do it to give cover to his caucus. Obama wants Reid to do it so he's not the bad guy on the public option and can still walk away with a win with reform, with bipartisanship, and with a card for everybody running for reelection." He also reports that Schumer was the one tasked with pitching Reid's opt-out-option strategy to the president. When he did, Beutler's source says, "Obama was less than responsive and asked questions that suggested he preferred an option that could get the trigger and bipartisan support." 

In true D.C. fashion, however, my sources paint a different picture. Senior Democratic sources close to the discussions tell me that the White House meeting was all about Olympia Snowe and how to secure her vote. It's no secret that the president is eager to call reform a bipartisan effort, and Snowe holds the one last candle of hope. But by the time Reid and Schumer entered the White House, Snowe was no longer the topic du jour for them. They were operating on a different calculus.

Earlier in the week, Reid realized that he stood to lose more votes by not including a public option than he'd gain by including the trigger. In other words, a trigger brought Snowe into the mix (and probably Lincoln, Landreiu, and Nelson) but lost the votes of a handful of liberal senators. Unlike the Ben Nelsons of the world, who've repeatedly aired their concerns to reporters, public-option proponents like Jay Rockefeller were making their case privately to leadership, largely through Schumer, who quickly learned that while liberals disdained an "opt-in" proposal, they could live with an opt-out, which is the model Reid ultimately decided on.

In conversations with Rockefeller and others, Schumer realized that he and Reid had been asking the wrong question of moderates. They shouldn't have beeen asking for moderate support for the opt-out option, they just needed to know if it was a dealbreaker. As it turns out, for several moderates it wasn't. For them, problem No. 1 was affordability. They worried that an individual mandate saddled low-income constituents with having to buy expensive insurance without providing them with appropriate subsidies. That would cause enormous voter backlash, especially for those senators up for reelection in 2014 when the provisions really kick in. If that issue could be resolved, then they could live with an opt-out public option, which some even conceded might ameliorate affordability concerns.

This was the new mindset Reid and Schumer brought to their meeting with the president, who was initially skeptical. Could they really get the 60 votes necessary to even get this bill to the Senate floor? And how do you then get Snowe's vote back? Sources say that the president didn't openly advocate for a different strategy but pushed back hard to test Reid's calculations. But he didn't commit to a particular option, trigger or otherwise—which shouldn't be surprising. After all, the president has been hedging on the public option for months. Several Senate sources expressed frustration to me about the White House's lack of clarity on the public plan. Public-option proponents have been waiting for a clear signal of the president's preference, believing that his stamp of approval would have made their vote counting significantly easier. They were privately disappointed that the president hadn't taken a more detailed stance in his September speech to Congress. 

So what's the truth behind the meeting? Was the White House aggressively pushing Reid to go with a trigger? Is the administration annoyed that Reid went with the opt-out plan? My reporting indicates no. But really, the only truth in the gossipy, he said-she said world of D.C. politics is that it's a lot more high school than anyone wants to admit.