Tom Daschle Spills The Public Option Beans He Has To Pick Up Right Away

In the latest Beltway book that will garner some attention, Think Progress' industrial Igor Volsky certainly got a major catch today from Tom Daschle talking about his new book about how health insurance reform happened.

It's a revelation that sure won't endear the Obama Administration towards the base it has already upset too many times before:

I asked Daschle if the White House had taken the option off the table in July 2009 and if all future efforts to resuscitate the provision (the public option) were destined to fail:

DASCHLE: I don’t think it was taken off the table completely. It was taken off the table as a result of the understanding that people had with the hospital association, with the insurance (AHIP), and others. I mean I think that part of the whole effort was based on a premise. That premise was, you had to have the stakeholders in the room and at the table. Lessons learned in past efforts is that without the stakeholders’ active support rather than active opposition, it’s almost impossible to get this job done.They wanted to keep those stakeholders in the room and this was the price some thought they had to pay. Now, it’s debatable about whether all of these assertions and promises are accurate, but that was the calculation. I think there is probably a good deal of truth to it. You look at past efforts and the doctors and the hospitals, and the insurance companies all opposed health care reform. This time, in various degrees of enthusiasm, they supported it. And if I had to point out some of the key differences between then and now, it would be the most important examples of the difference.

So behind closed doors of late summer 2009, the public option was dead says a major primary source here. Yet, the Obama Administration didn't want to break the news of that highly unpopular move to its base, so it played the game of simply lying by telling everyone that they were fighting for it.

Immediately after this was published, Daschle released a statement basically rejecting what he wrote in his book, saying instead that he "did not mean to suggest in any way that the President was not committed to it" and that the President supported the public option 100%.

It really is quite amazing how Daschle refutes his own book in such a short period of time (because you know he was urged to do just as so once the White House spit whatever they were drinking out of their mouths reading it).

Obviously, if Daschle wanted to keep it a secret of how Obama really pulled the plug on the public option, then he should have had the common sense to not put it in his book at all. But the drive to place all the details in order for his book to be successful was paramount for Daschle, and now very damaging for President Obama.

They can try their hardest to cover up their responsibility of getting the bill that they wanted in the end. But the Obama Administration will continue to look like utter fools scared to just own up to what they did instead of hiding behind their favorite "Congress Didn't Allow Us" card.