From this Morning’s Jolt, making its way to you through this system of tubes we call the Internet:

A White House Rallying Cry of . . . ‘Surrender’?
Some very strange messages are coming from the president himself on health care. At a DNC fundraiser Thursday night, he said, “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.” Well, polls say not passing this legislative monstrosity is indeed the right thing, but putting that aside, that’s quite a different message than, “we must pass this,” isn’t it? Put another way, “My signature proposal that I spent a year working on might go down in flames, and we’ll have to see how the voters feel about that.”
It comes on the heels of this report from Politico: “Sen. Al Franken ripped into White House senior adviser David Axelrod this week during a tense, closed-door session with Senate Democrats.” Apparently Franken is tiring of being told to pass a bill without any hint of whether the Obama administration prefers the House bill, the Senate bill, a hybrid, or what.
One Senate Democrat who’s pretty representative of the lefties is claiming to see the white flag: “”The president was weighing in pretty heavily on the discussions between the House and Senate before the Massachusetts special [Senate] election,” Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) told Huffington Post. “It’s dried up since.”
If you see Sen. Jim DeMint, start calling him Wellington since the health care bill is starting to look a lot like Waterloo after all.
Jen Rubin’s sense of what’s going on: “Obama isn’t known for delving into details of legislation, so he might well be out of ideas and interest in the finer points of what was to be his signature issue. But it is also possible that the White House has figured out that ObamaCare is a loser with the general electorate. In that case, if Obama is to stabilize his own approval ratings, it would be better for the country to avoid more uproar over a hugely unpopular bill. Not giving direction to the Reid-Pelosi duo is tantamount to killing the bill. Whichever theory is right, the result is the same. We won’t see anything passed approximating the massive ObamaCare bill. In the end, that’s a good thing for the country and probably for incumbents, who in their heart of hearts have probably always understood that you can’t pass a bill on a strict party line vote that 70 percent of the country hates and expect to “sell it” to them later.”
A minor quibble — I’d rather not be the Democratic incumbent who has to offer the defense, “Yes, I did vote for that kidney stone of a bill, the one that had all of you out there forming angry mob and swarming my town hall meetings last summer, but everybody chill out, because the bill didn’t pass anyway.”
Allahpundit: “Obama’s [tush] isn’t on the line in November; what does he have to lose by twisting arms in the senior chamber to whatever extent he can to pass this thing? Or is it more a case of him realizing that with the 60th vote gone and defeats in Jersey, Virginia, and Massachusetts on his record, he really has no more leverage available to use?”
The delightfully profane Dennis the Peasant: “Now I’d be the last person in the blogosphere to accuse progressives of being a bunch of [the term Rahm Emanuel used that offended Sarah Palin], but just where have you folks been, and what have you been smoking? Barack Obama isn’t going to champion health care reform with the public and he certainly isn’t going to fight for health care reform in the halls of Congress. That’s hard work which requires focus, discipline, and fortitude. That just isn’t Bambi’s style . . . Hey, always remember: You got what you wanted. Enjoy.”
Mmm. My Schadenfreude tastes like bratwurst!