Regarding this, I'm wondering how many times we're going to be baited with anonymous quotes about the death of the public option. How many times has it happened?
Over the last several months it's almost become a regular feature of the news, like weather reports and stock market updates. Every week, stories about how the public option isn't going to happen, or how the White House is telling the House progressives to STFU about it. We've seen numerous stories about alleged White House support for co-ops or triggers or nothing at all. And every time, there's a wild kneejerk spaz attack about it.
The fact remains that the only named source in the piece is Dan Pfeiffer who insists that the whole trigger/Snowe story "is false." Now any quote should be taken with a grain of skepticism, but in relative terms, it's a good rule of thumb to take a named quote more seriously than an unnamed one.
However, based upon the verifiable information we have -- the empirical evidence of the president's steady position on the public option -- the only reason the White House might've brought up the trigger/Snowe solution was because, as of Friday, Reid was still a couple of votes shy of breaking the Republican/Democratic filibuster (and it is -- as long as Nelson and Bayh haven't committed to cloture, they're filibustering healthcare reform). I imagine that in the course of a conversation about the most important issue of the president's first term, there's going to be discussions about every possible path to victory.
As I wrote yesterday, this is evidence of a failure of leadership -- Reid's leadership -- and his inability to muscle through the filibuster, even with 60 votes in his caucus. If Reid were sitting pretty with a solid 60 for the public option, the White House might not have mentioned the trigger/Snowe solution (if they did at all).
UPDATE: When are normally smart people going to stop taking the bait?