It’s too bad that repeated, endless, flagrant dishonesty doesn’t do much of anything to damage a politician’s ability to be taken seriously as a sober-minded centrist deal-maker, or Chuck Grassley would be in a world of pain:

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy would be refused treatment for his brain tumor in England — at least according to one of the allegations lobbed at Britain’s state-funded health-care service recently by critics of President Obama’s proposed health-care reforms. Such claims have irked British health officials, who say they are misleading, exaggerated and sometimes just plain wrong. [...]

One of the most surprising of these was the rumor — given an airing by Senate Finance Committee Chairman Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) — that Kennedy, 77, would not receive treatment for his brain tumor if he were in England because he is too old.

“That’s just wrong,” a British Health Department spokesman said. “The NHS in England provides health services on the basis of clinical need, irrespective of age or ability to pay.”

Note that there’s actually a two-fold lie here. First Grassley falsely implies that congressional Democrats are proposing to create an NHS-like system. Second, he lies about how the NHS operates. And he pays no price for it. He’ll still be Max Baucus‘s key partner in crafting health care legislation.

The typical “blogger” thing to do is criticize Democrats for being too willing to compromise on substance without tangible gains, but this looks like tangible gains to me:

A new coalition this morning is launching $12 million in TV ads to support President Obama’s health-reform plan, in the opening wave of a planned tens of millions of dollars this fall. The new group, funded largely by PhRMA, is called Americans for Stable Quality Care. It includes some odd bedfellows: the American Medical Association, FamiliesUSA, the Federation of American Hospitals, PhRMA and SEIU. [...]

The group’s campaign is likely to mean that White House supporters keep the upper hand on the airwaves. PhRMA’s participation is key, because the group has promised to kick in as much as $150 million for advertising and grass-roots activity to help pass the president’s plan. But the new group could provoke complaints from the left. The debut ad is mean to shore up support among the conservative House Blue Dog Democrats, and to target swing senators. So it’s airing in Alaska, Arkansas, Colorado, Indiana, Louisiana, Maine, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, North Dakota, South Dakota and Virginia. The first buy is expected to run for two weeks, with a weekly spend of around $3 million.

The fact of the matter is that the country is likely to pay a price for moving in the direction of health reform that gets buy-in from these kind of interest groups. But that’s a price relative to a theoretical universe in which it’s possible to pass a better plan with PhRMA spending hundreds of millions in negative ads rather than kicking in money to help finance pro-reform ads. In the real world of politics, this looks to me like dealmaking that’s paying off.

I think Ezra Klein nails this:

As Dan says, we’ve not yet seen Obama’s negotiating style come into focus. But we will soon. That said, I don’t know how many times a president has to fail to solve this problem before we admit that it’s not a matter of presidential messaging, or toughness, or will, or strategy. FDR, Truman, Nixon, Carter and Clinton all took runs at this prize. All of them failed. And Lyndon Johnson went for Medicare and Medicaid because he was daunted by the challenge of comprehensive health-care reform.

That’s right. I know a lot of people on the left who seem to have voted for Barack Obama because they liked his progressive agenda, then gotten excited when Obama won the election because they liked his progressive agenda, then Obama proposed progressive measures to the congress and they were excited, then it turned out that key congressional players like Collin Peterson and Rick Boucher and Max Baucus were less left-wing than Obama so actually legislative outcomes would be considerably less left-wing than Obama’s campaign proposal. It’s all well and good to be disappointed with this situation but it doesn’t make a ton of sense to me to do what a lot of people seem to be doing and becoming disappointed with Obama.

I recall back during the primary campaign that there was a kind of misguided sentiment out there that the key factor influencing whether or not we could get comprehensive health reform or good energy legislation in 2009 was whether you believed Obama’s story about “bringing people together” or John Edwards’ story about “fighting” or Hillary Clinton’s story about gritty experience and determination. The fact of the matter, though, is that legislating is about who controls the veto points. The difference between a conservative president whose ideas are checked by the 40th most liberal senator (Mark Warner or Mark Begich, it seems) and a progressive president whose ideas are checked by the 60th most liberal senator (Ben Nelson or Olympia Snowe) is pretty enormous. But when comparing two different possible progressive presidents, the fact remains that the veto points are going to be where they’re going to be. On foreign policy and some other matters the president has tons of discretion and it’s a different story. But big-picture domestic legislation in the modern era is controlled by congress.