Here's why it's a good thing for blogs like HuffPo to criticize the WH and the Dem leadership when they stray from trying to move progressive legislation:
Durbin: Progressives Forced Our Hand On Public Option
Democratic leaders were forced to include a national public health insurance option as part of health care reform by progressive Democratic senators who refused to support anything less, Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) said on Monday...
For many years, it's been centrist and conservative-leaning senators who have been scoring legislative victories by digging in their heels, so this represented a quite dramatic turnabout. It is difficult to remember the last time that progressives won a legislative victory by laying down firm demands and sticking to them. In the House, the Congressional Progressive Caucus has found its feet, too, and is locked in a final battle with conservative Democrats over the shape of a public option.
Now, I'm not one of those who believes Obama opposed putting a public option in the Senate health care bill because he's some kind of sleeper Republican or corporate sellout like some of the wackier critics on the left have been saying. But I do think he's a very wily and cautious politician and he may well have opposed the idea because he was afraid Reid couldn't get the 60 votes needed, particularly after his mishap with counting votes on the Medicare rates adjustment vote for doctors last week.
That said, would progressives in the House and Senate have been emboldened to hold the line this way if the base in the blogosphere had just gone along with the people who said Trust Obama. He's got this? No fucking way.
If we'd done that, what we'd be "celebrating" today that Obama has got would be triggers, or a co-op, or an individual mandate with no public option at all.
So I say all hail the critics who've helped progressives move their agenda against excessive centrist caution.