The Associated Press makes much hay of comments by President Obama at a Democratic National Committee fundraiser Thursday night, saying they reveal the president “is now acknowledging his health care overhaul may die in Congress.” Emphasis added below:

His remarks at a Democratic National Committee fundraiser Thursday night sounded contradictory at times, complicating congressional leaders’ effort to revive health care legislation as Democrats hunger for guidance from the White House. Even while saying he still wanted to get the job done, Obama counseled going slow, and bowed to new political realities. Democrats no longer command a filibuster-proof Senate majority, and voters and lawmakers are far more concerned with jobs and the economy than with enacting sweeping and expensive changes to the health system.
“I think it’s very important for us to have a methodical, open process over the next several weeks, and then let’s go ahead and make a decision,” Obama said Thursday night.
“And it may be that … if Congress decides we’re not going to do it, even after all the facts are laid out, all the options are clear, then the American people can make a judgment as to whether this Congress has done the right thing for them or not,” the president said. “And that’s how democracy works. There will be elections coming up and they’ll be able to make a determination and register their concerns one way or the other during election time.”
It seemed to be a shift in tone for the issue Obama campaigned on and made the centerpiece of his domestic agenda last year.

But at least 50 percent of this is clever framing. The prognosis on Obamacare hasn’t changed all that much since Scott Brown’s victory in Massachusetts. In short: Things aren’t good. Congressional Democrats are stalling, depending on which reports you believe, either because they can’t figure out the procedural gymnastics that would let them pass the Senate bill simultaneously with a reconciliation-driven fix thereof; or because Senate moderates have lost their taste for ramming the bill through with 51 votes; or because Nancy Pelosi can’t keep 218 on-board for any bill that could make it out of the Senate.

The president knows all this, and he knows that he can no longer afford to stake dwindling political capital on his oft-repeated, now-empty guarantees that “health care will get done this year.”

But far from a guileless and humbling admission, some on the left are interpreting Obama’s remarks as a kind of fighting retreat to another trope he has pushed all year: If the American people only understood the bill, they would support it.

The key passage is here:

“The next step is what I announced at the State of the Union, which is to call on our Republican friends to present their ideas. What I’d like to do is have a meeting whereby I’m sitting with the Republicans, sitting with the Democrats, sitting with health care experts, and let’s just go through these bills. . . . And then I think that we’ve got to go ahead and move forward on a vote,” Obama said Thursday.

The New Republic’s Jonathan Chait sees this as rope-a-dope:

The most important part is what Obama says should happen first: Democrats should settle their differences and work out a final bill. That’s crucial. Then he wants to sit down with both parties, and health care experts, and walk through the details in a methodical way. I’d guess he’s imagining a process that might look a little like his back-and-forth with House Republicans — they present him with wild claims about a government takeover, and he calmly responds. They insist that their ideas are better, and he gets to show that they’re not. Then you vote. In other words, a debate in which he gets to take center stage, on top of the kabuki theater of a House debate. That way Obama gets to demonstrate that the plan he has is the product of having considered all the alternatives and arriving at the best way to solve the problem, not just cooking up a backroom deal. The idea seems to be to use his wonky, technocratic style to counteract the process-based objections and sell the bill.

Having been bloodied by Republicans in all the tactical battles hitherto, the president is signalling that he will try to draw the Republicans off-sides — in the kind of format in which he acquitted himself well last week against House GOPers — by revealing their ideas on health-care to be lacking and/or outside the mainstream.

For what it’s worth, I agree with Chait. Obama is pegging the hopes for health-care reform on a big, televised victory over Republicans on the merits. It’s a desperate but admittedly novel gambit. I just don’t think it will materialize. For one thing, Obama has been explaining and explaining his bill for over a year now, over which time the polls have shown support fade in inverse proportion to the rhetoric. At the State of the Union, armed with the national stage, Obama waited 50 paragraphs to broach the subject of health care, and when he did he offered nothing new or game-changing.

For another, the Republicans would be foolish to let Democrats stake the fate of this zombie of a bill on a televised publicity stunt. For a year, Democrats have built this trillion-dollar entitlement — every sweetheart deals, every kickback, and every carve-out — in the cloakrooms of Washington. Now, at the moment when transparency is at its most valuable as politics and its least valuable as policy, the administration has found religion, complete with much public wailing and teeth-gnashing about how openness was sacrificed at the altar of efficacy.

Republicans shouldn’t let Obama get away with this. The time for Republicans to demonstrate the superiority of a conservative approach for lowering health-care costs and expanding coverage is after Obamacare is defeated, once and for all.