BIRNBAUM: Betting the ranch on a longshot

For a while during last week’s Health Care Summit, President Obama sounded like he wanted to find compromise with the Republicans. But, by design or by accident, he quickly dropped the pretense and made clear that he intended to confront rather than cooperate with the other side.

Now, lawmakers are on a collision course not just over health care, but over a long list of other issues, too. While saying in public he wants bipartisanship, the president has clearly decided that fighting for health reform - with Democratic votes only - is better for his party than accepting defeat without going another round.

This is an extraordinary decision. It flies in the face of public polls - which continue to show declining support for the legislation - and defies the message sent by the voters in three separate, statewide elections since November. Democratic candidates were defeated in Virginia, New Jersey and Massachusetts in large part because they backed the president’s health reforms.

Rarely have the two parties been as divided over both the substance and the politics of anything. Most Democrats believe that the president’s health bill is the right thing to do and that voters will come to understand that as soon as the bill becomes law.

Republicans are equally persuaded that Mr. Obama’s large-scale health care changes are wrong and that the Democratic Party will suffer massive setbacks during this year’s elections if it continues to champion them.

In fact, Republican strategists are as eager as White House supporters for Democrats to use the so-called reconciliation process to push the legislation through the Senate with a simple majority vote. The Republicans are betting that voters will punish Democrats for trying to ram the bill through in this way; Democrats think voters will be grateful.

Someone is miscalculating and control of the House, the Senate or both could well be at stake.

What can’t be denied is that Democrats - if they persist on this course - will be wagering a second, full year on health reform. The 2010 congressional calendar is short (due to the coming elections) and lawmakers’ vacations are long. If Democratic leaders devote a large portion of the spring to trying to scare up enough votes to repass health reform using reconciliation, not much time will be left for anything else.

Both the House and the Senate will be preoccupied with this effort. As a matter of fact, what’s not widely understood is that the toughest battles will occur in the House, which would have to take not one but two separate votes to get things rolling for reconciliation. At the moment, that’s two votes more than Democratic leaders have support for.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi will have to wrestle with conservative Blue Dog Democrats, with anti-abortion Democrats and with assorted other reluctant Democrats to even come close to the majority she needs to get health reform moving again. That will be a difficult task that will eat up both time and political capital that could be used on other matters.

The antagonism that the Democrats’ effort will convey will also likely shut down bipartisanship on other issues for a while. Do not expect consensus to be either sought or found on many fronts.

Republicans, in short, will not be in a bargaining mood as long as Democrats are plotting to (as they see it) shove a dangerous bill down their throats and the throats of the American people.

Almost no matter how the exercise turns out, Democratic efforts to use reconciliation as a vehicle will create enough bad feelings to put almost every kind of legislation on hold.

The prospects for comprehensive health reform do not look promising. But efforts to save it may be fatal to all sorts of initiatives.

Senators are getting close to devising a compromise, we hear, on financial regulation - the legislation that will try to prevent another Wall Street meltdown. Other lawmakers are hammering out a bill that would reduce the amount of greenhouse gas emissions. But both exercises will likely be delayed if the leaders’ attention remains focused on a quixotic effort to revive health reform.

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