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Yesterday a Senate panel rejected a government-run “public” insurance option as part of healthcare reform, handing insurers an early victory and setting the stage for a long fight over one of the bill’s most contentious issues.

The death of the public option is an Obama failure – he owns it.  President Obama began negotiations  with absolutely no room for negotiation. Why? Because Obama had already abandoned his principles by not offering a bill which included a single payer plan as the preferred method for reforming America’s health care system.  President Obama believed, naively, that since his reform bill included a “public option” and not a single payer plan, that Republicans would be more likely to join him and make health reform a bipartisan effort.

It was a genuine effort but Obama forgot one thing – politics is a blood sport.  American politics is not now, nor has it ever been about helping people or doing the right thing for America.  In contrast, it is almost always about who gets how much and when. It’s a fight to the death over the billions of tax dollars Americans pay every year. It’s a grab for cash by some of the slickest hustlers, robber barons, and con-artists that the world has ever seen.

Knowing this, you can never approach a political battle with the mindset that the people you’re negotiating with are negotiating in good faith because they never are.  Your mission, Obama, is to defeat them, not convince them, or placate them, or even negotiate with them.  Defeating them is the only way you win. It’s the only way you win votes for your re-election and it’s the only way you ever see your vision manifested. Learn from this President Obama, or there won’t be a second chance or a second term.