Sauce For The Goose, Obama….

Battered for weeks by an artfully choreographed resistance campaign, President Barack Obama returned from pushing his healthcare reform plan in western states last night, amid signs that he might be ready to seek compromise on key details of it with his foes.

Heh!

As was predicted before all this started, Obama has fatally overreached himself on the healthcare proposal.

And as the shine fades from their idol, the far left are up in arms:

But even as the first hints began to surface that the White House could consider dropping its insistence that a new healthcare system includes some kind of public entity offering insurance to consumers, the liberal wing of his party was rising up yesterday to denounce any such retreat.

Red-on-red. My sort of fight... :)

"I don't think it can pass without the public option," Howard Dean, the former Democratic party chairman, warned on CBS TV. "You can't really do healthcare reform without it. There are too many people who understand, including the President himself, the public option is absolutely linked to reform."

Senator John Rockefeller of West Virginia reaffirmed his support for a public insurance body. "I believe the inclusion of a strong public plan option in health reform legislation is a must," he said.

Sadly for them, even Obama can’t buck the numbers:

However, it has been clear for months that in the Senate at least, any bill with the public option stands no chance of winning bi-partisan support and may very well drive away conservative Democrats, a result that could kill the effort entirely. "There are not the votes in the US Senate for the public option," Senator Kent Conrad, a Democrat, said at the weekend.

And in the wake of this impending defeat for their ambitious plans, the progressives are eager to paint this as an organised campaign by their political enemies, rather than a sign that middle America is finally waking up to the truth behind the man they voted into office last year:

What is certain is that the administration still hasn't regained control of its reform message. The August recess has been dominated by images of members of Mr Obama's party being barracked at healthcare rallies by citizens apparently enraged by what they see as a "socialist" take-over of their healthcare choices.

Little of this is spontaneous. There is ample evidence that many of those at the town hall meetings are being encouraged to attend by conservative advocacy organisations such as Americans for Prosperity, Grassfire, Tea Party Patriots, and Resistnet, and even given tips on how to pressure legislators. FreedomWorks has reportedly posted 380,000 "August Recess Action Kits" to stoke the brouhaha.

But presumably it was just peachy when groups like ACORN and Code Pink and the unions were doing the same thing when Bush was in power?

You taught them well, Dems. Time to eat up that goose, with extra sauce…