Truth about the public option momentarily emerges, quickly scampers back into hiding

By Glenn Greenwald
Salon.com

(updated below)

As I've noted before, the column of mine which produced the greatest level of hate mail and anger in the last year -- both in terms of intensity and quantity -- was this one from August, 2009, when I compiled the evidence strongly suggesting that the White House, despite Obama's multiple statements to the contrary, had secretly bargained away the public option with corporate interests early in the negotiation process and therefore did not intend to push for its inclusion in the final bill. That produced so much anger because it contradicted the central Democratic orthodoxy at the time that Obama -- as he claimed in public -- was trying as hard as he could to have a public option in the health care bill, but . . . gosh darn it, he was unfortunately stymied by his inability to get 60 votes for it, despite his best efforts (the fact that the health care bill ultimately passed via reconciliation, whereby the public option would have needed only 50 votes, was a separate issue).

Illustrative of the backlash was this post from The New Republic's Jonathan Chait:

I don't agree with Greenwald's positions on foreign policy and civil liberties, but he does have a valid beef with Obama in these areas. But when he insists that Obama secretly opposed the public option and has never wanted more stimulus, in the face of overwhelming evidence that the administration pushed the Senate as far left as it would go on those bills, he is revealing himself as a fanatic.

At the time Chait wrote that, there was already ample evidence that the White House had, in fact, secretly negotiated away the public option early on in the process, including confirmation from a New York Times reporter of the existence of such a deal, as well the fact that Russ Feingold said as clearly as he could that the reason there was no public option in the final bill was because the White House never pushed for it, because the final bill -- without the public option -- was the "legislation that the president wanted in the first place."

(More here.)