Opinion: Steny Hoyer predicts healthcare bill next week: What if he’s right?

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Not much equivocation over healthcare reform today from Rep. Steny Hoyer of Maryland, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s political enforcer as majority leader.

‘We believe we will be able to pass a healthcare bill next week.’

And:

‘We are either going to get there through committee by the end of this week, and through the House by the end of next week, and into negotiations with the Senate over a conference report.’

So you heard it first today on Fox News Channel’s ‘Happening Now’ and read it here now. Which brings up an unconventional but genuinely intriguing thought in terms of political strategy.

What if we’re all being played here?

What if all this handwringing and professed hesitancy and Blue Dog worries and Senate Finance Chairman Max ‘Not Usually Captain Courageous’ Baucus criticizing his party’s president is part of a choreographed political pageant, capped by the president’s energetic agenda-driving this week. To be sure, hard to believe for fractitious Democrats, who more often seem like a bodyless bird with 10 wings. But...

All staged by the savvy unconventional political team that turned a little-known Illinois frosh senator into the political upstart Barack Obama who overturned the unbeatable, inevitable Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton just last year. The same folks who may have convinced the D.C. media pack to issue its healthcare reform death pronouncements.

After all, there are ample Democratic votes to pass anything in both houses. The president persists in talking about ‘now is not the time to stop.’ No worry coming from his lips until now and not likely during tonight’s presidential news conference either. Same unflappable pedal-to-the-metal demeanor as he displayed last year after riding high into New Hampshire from his stunning Iowa caucus win and Clinton found her voice and waxed him good up there.

Obama is, after all, a self-confessed long-haul kinda guy.

And next week when, miracle of miracles, Congress cobbles together some kind of healthcare reform, almost any kind of healthcare reform, before it takes yet another month off.

Then, what was unbeknownst to us already in the cards, emerges framed not as just a normal ho-hum win for the new guy but as an incredible, unexpected comeback and summer-saving victory to believe in that was, truth be told, already scripted to happen?

And the president coasts through August and his family week on Martha’s Vineyard looking like, well, a successful powerful president, instead of a waning, ineffective one as George W. Bush appeared to be in his first White House summer. Before something called 9/11.

Just saying.

-- Andrew Malcolm

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