Which lawmakers can, and can't, play the health-care game

By Eugene Robinson
WashPost
Friday, December 18, 2009

As the attempt to pass meaningful health-care reform stumbles oafishly toward home plate, having missed a base or two along the way, it's hard not to repeat Casey Stengel's famous lament about the hapless 1962 Mets: "You look up and down the bench and you have to say to yourself, 'Can't anybody here play this game?' "

The answer is that some can and some can't.

Nancy Pelosi can play. Faced with adamantine opposition from Republicans, take-no-prisoners exhortations from progressives and foot-dragging equivocation from nervous Blue Dogs, the speaker still managed to get a bill out of the House that included almost everything President Obama wanted, including a public health insurance option.

It always amuses me to hear people call Pelosi a "San Francisco liberal," because while the description is objectively true, it suggests a certain delicacy of sensibility. In fact, Pelosi was born and raised in the bare-knuckles world of big-city machine politics -- her father was Tommy D'Alesandro, a legendary Baltimore mayor. She knows how to count votes and how to keep them counted.

(More here.)