Looks like the House is realizing that if they are going to pass any kind of health care “reform,” they’ll have to give up the public option:

Asked during rounds on the Sunday news shows whether he could vote for a final bill that does not embrace a public plan, Clyburn said: “Yes, sir, I can.”
Clyburn added: “We want a public option to do basically three things: Create more choice for insurers, create more competition for insurance companies, and to contain costs. So if we can come up with a process by which these three things can be done, then I’m all for it. Whether or not we label it a public option or not is of no consequence.”
While insisting “it’s not dead,” Rep. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland said he recognizes realities in the Senate, where Democrats had to scrape up every vote from their side even to pass a bill without a government plan to compete in the private insurance marketplace.
“Before the House was to give up the public option, we would want to be persuaded that there are other mechanisms in whatever bill comes out that will keep down premiums,” said Van Hollen, appearing to sketch out a bottom line without a government plan necessarily included. “We’ve got to make sure that the final product is affordable.”
Sen. Robert Menendez, D-N.J., underscored the divisions Democrats will need to bridge when negotiators from the House and Senate meet next month to reconcile the two bills. He said there will need to be more give on the House side than the Senate, which took weeks to find the 60 votes needed for passage.
“If we are going to have a final law, it will look a lot more like the Senate version than the House version,” Menendez asserted.

And then there’s this:

Democrats are retooling and reprising their “Party of No” attack on Republicans in Congress after they unanimously rejected financial reform and health care bills in votes this month.
[…]
The salvos come as other Democrats say they plan to paint Republicans as obstructionist for their down-the-line opposition to Senate health care legislation Thursday.
“History will judge harshly those who have chosen the simple path of obstruction over the hard work of making change. It always does,” said Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.), an architect on the Senate financial reform bill.

What a pathetic attempt to pass the buck for their own incompetence. The Republicans don’t have the ability to obstruct anything and they are counting on the fact that the electorate is too uninformed to understand that. The Democrats can do whatever they want and if they fail, they only have themselves to blame and if they succeed, then they own whatever they pass. They can try to point the finger at Republicans but they are in control and we are still at double digit unemployment and nothing they’ve done has worked and they haven’t even attempted to try anything else. They’ve spent all their time on a bill that no one wants instead of passing a corporate tax cut to help spur businesses to start hiring again. No amount of ads are going to hide the fact that the Democrats are an epic fail at leadership.