Why Obama's health plan falters

I've started deleting them as spam. I'm not talking about the enlarge-your-penis emails or "You've Won the Lottery" notices. I'm talking about the increasingly-urgent e-mails coming for weeks from liberal Netroots groups calling for a "public option" for healthcare–a government insurance plan citizens could choose to PAY FOR instead of private insurance. Never has so much passion been so misdirected. If what these liberal groups ultimately wanted out of President Obama and corporate-funded Democrats in Congress was a topnotch public plan to compete with the first-rate private plans, the wrong way to get it was to make that THE demand. Especially of a President whose instinct is toward conciliation and splitting the difference with big business and the rightwing. Sure, Obama was a community organizer once. That was decades ago when Russia was still our mortal enemy, Nelson Mandela was still an official State Department terrorist threat and the White House was still funding Islamist fanatics in Afghanistan. For the last dozen years Obama has been a politician–and a consummate compromiser at that. Have we failed to notice?