Just talked to a plugged-in Republican source on the House side, who thinks Democrats will manage to muscle through a bill next week. He figures if they were down 20-something votes on cap-and-trade and still managed to pass it, they’ll be able to pull off something similar on health care. The Democratic freshmen concerned about the surtax will probably cave, since they’re freshmen. And the Blue Dogs’ bark almost always proves worse than their bite (and today’s “pay-go” vote was a sop to the Blue Dogs). He thinks if health care is jammed through next week, it might stoke more outrage back home in August, but on the other hand, the Democrats will have at least passed something, and they know failure next week probably means that momentum for the public option withers away entirely. His guess is that the public option still will die eventually and Democrats will have to retreat to something like the Wyden-Bennett bill, whereby they can achieve most of their goals through massive regulation of the insurance market.