WASHINGTON — Howard Dean ran for president in 2004 as the outsider ready to battle an entrenched establishment in Washington. And so, four years later, did Barack Obama.

Now, one year into Mr. Obama’s presidency, a sharp dispute between the president and Mr. Dean over the health care bill the Senate approved Thursday — Mr. Dean denounced it as a sellout, while Mr. Obama heralded it as a historic breakthrough — is illustrating the roots of the ideological  breach within the Democratic party.It is not just that the left wing of the party thinks that its centrists hold too much sway and are too quick to cave when faced with pressure from the right. It is also that this White House, stocked as it is with insiders, people whose view of politics is shaped by the compromises inherent in legislating, is confronting a liberal base made up largely of outsiders to the lawmaking process who are asking why they should accept politics as usual.

As much as Mr. Obama presented himself as an outsider during his campaign, a lesson of this battle is that this is a president who would rather work within the system than seek to upend it. He is not the ideologue ready to stage a symbolic fight that could end in defeat; he is a former senator comfortable in dealing with the arcane rules of the Senate and prepared to accept compromise in search of a larger goal. For the most part, Democrats on Capitol Hill have stuck with him.

By contrast, Mr. Dean, the former Democratic Party chairman who has long had strained relations with this administration, said the White House was slow to fight and quick to make concessions — particularly on creating a public insurance plan — and demanded that Democrats kill the Senate version of the health care bill.

That sentiment was echoed by liberal efforts that grew up around the Dean campaign, notably Daily Kos and MoveOn.org, which argued that Mr. Obama was not tough enough in staring down foes, be they insurance companies or Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, the Democrat-turned-independent from Connecticut.

“He ran as someone who would fight against entrenched special interests on behalf of the little guy,” said Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, which has emerged as one of Mr. Obama’s leading critics in recent days. “And what we learned in this debate is that he’s not willing to fight and exert pressure on entrenched special interests when it comes to big ideas.”

Of course, it is easier to be an outsider when you are on the outside, which is where Mr. Dean is these days, after making an unsuccessful effort to win a post in the Obama White House. And Mr. Dean’s longtime feud with Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, was noted by many Democrats who were taken aback by the sharp tenor of Mr. Dean’s attack on others in the party. (Mr. Dean declined to comment.)

Still, Mr. Obama’s approach to this battle should not be a surprise to anyone who has followed his career or his campaign for the White House. He served in the United States Senate and in the Illinois Senate. His choice for chief of staff — Mr. Emanuel — was the No. 3 person in the House Democratic leadership, and many of his top West Wing aides came out of staff jobs in the Senate.

Mr. Obama may find it frustrating that it is impossible under Senate rules to get something through without 60 votes, but those are the rules and he is going to play by them. He was not about to go to Connecticut and to whip up the public against Mr. Lieberman, or to press for him to be relieved of his leadership positions in the Senate, as Mr. Green suggested he do.

“The president wasn’t after a Pyrrhic victory — he wasn’t into symbolism,” said David Axelrod, a senior adviser to Mr. Obama. “The president is after solving a problem that has bedeviled a country and countless families for generations.”

All of this has come at a time of strains between Mr. Obama and the left. Mr. Obama has come under fire on several fronts, like health care, escalation of the war in Afghanistan and his failure so far to make good on a campaign pledge to end the ban on open homosexuals in the military.

Mr. Obama has moved to the center on some issues since he became president, particularly on elements of national security. Still, he never presented himself as a doctrinaire liberal, and much of what he is doing as president tracks with what he talked about during the campaign.

Mr. Obama’s call to send more troops to Afghanistan is what he always talked about in the context of outlining his opposition to the war in Iraq. “It’s not like he woke up one morning and said, ‘Let’s go fight a war in Afghanistan,’ ” Mr. Emanuel said. “He talked about it in the campaign.”

And Mr. Obama never exhibited the left’s passion for establishing a public insurance option as part of an overhaul of health care. He rarely talked about it during scores of debates, speeches and interviews during the campaign; instead he focused on expanding coverage, lowering costs and ending health insurance abuses.

During the campaign, many people saw in Mr. Obama what they wanted to see in him, and in the Democratic primaries he often appealed more directly to the left than did Hillary Rodham Clinton, his main rival for most of the contest. The question now is whether legislative and policy accomplishment — signing a health care bill, however imperfect in the eyes of liberals, steadying the economy, winding down the war in Iraq — will be enough, assuming Mr. Obama achieves them, to maintain the support and enthusiasm of those on the left who wanted even more from him.

Read the full article, here.

READ Krugman: Tidings of Comfort, The New York Times, December 24, 2009, by Paul Krugman:

So why are so many people complaining? There are three main groups of critics.

First, there’s the crazy right, the tea party and death panel people — a lunatic fringe that is no longer a fringe but has moved into the heart of the Republican Party. In the past, there was a general understanding, a sort of implicit clause in the rules of American politics, that major parties would at least pretend to distance themselves from irrational extremists. But those rules are no longer operative. No, Virginia, at this point there is no sanity clause.

A second strand of opposition comes from what I think of as the Bah Humbug caucus: fiscal scolds who routinely issue sententious warnings about rising debt. By rights, this caucus should find much to like in the Senate health bill, which the Congressional Budget Office says would reduce the deficit, and which — in the judgment of leading health economists — does far more to control costs than anyone has attempted in the past.

But, with few exceptions, the fiscal scolds have had nothing good to say about the bill. And in the process they have revealed that their alleged concern about deficits is, well, humbug. As Slate’s Daniel Gross says, what really motivates them is “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, is receiving social insurance.”

Finally, there has been opposition from some progressives who are unhappy with the bill’s limitations. Some would settle for nothing less than a full, Medicare-type, single-payer system. Others had their hearts set on the creation of a public option to compete with private insurers. And there are complaints that the subsidies are inadequate, that many families will still have trouble paying for medical care.

Unlike the tea partiers and the humbuggers, disappointed progressives have valid complaints. But those complaints don’t add up to a reason to reject the bill. Yes, it’s a hackneyed phrase, but politics is the art of the possible.

The truth is that there isn’t a Congressional majority in favor of anything like single-payer. There is a narrow majority in favor of a plan with a moderately strong public option. The House has passed such a plan. But given the way the Senate rules work, it takes 60 votes to do almost anything. And that fact, combined with total Republican opposition, has placed sharp limits on what can be enacted.

If progressives want more, they’ll have to make changing those Senate rules a priority. They’ll also have to work long term on electing a more progressive Congress. But, meanwhile, the bill the Senate has just passed, with a few tweaks — I’d especially like to move the start date up from 2014, if that’s at all possible — is more or less what the Democratic leadership can get.

See What Congress’ Likely Health Care Overhaul Means for You, Truthout, December 25, 2009, by Jordan Rau:

Washington – Now that the Senate has passed a hotly debated health care bill, Congress is headed to the next step: House of Representatives-Senate negotiations in January to hammer out a final version. Given the Senate’s difficulty in passing a bill, the final legislation is likely to tilt strongly toward that chamber’s version. Here’s where things stand and how you might be affected.

Watch President Obama on Senate Passage of Health Reform: The White House – 4:40

COMMENTARY on Obama and the Health Insurance Bill

by Paul Evans

I am still somewhat supportive of Mr. Obama’s efforts, overall, although increasingly seeing myself as a dissident voice. Still at times, like many progressives, I have felt betrayed by his pragmatic acceptance of the status quo in Washington, a kind of “politics as the art of the possible”, applied with a hands off approach towards Congress and an overall willingness to “settle.” To accept things as they are and not fight to steer them in a more hopeful, decent, progressive direction. My conclusion is that for Obama to try to achieve a huge agenda utilizing the instrument of Congress without catalyzing it towards real change and reform seems a hollow, cosmetic achievement. It is not the “change” we hoped for.

Still, Obama didn’t put the people who populate Congress in office, nor write the rules allowing the sort of lobbying which runs so rampant today.

I totally disagree with him on the surge in Afghanistan, but I do feel that his foreign policy people have a far better feel than do I for how things will ultimately shake down in the Middle East. I don’t like it, but I admit they’re more informed and can see farther into the future.

On the health care bill, when you think about Obama “sitting back and letting lobbyists do their work on the bill”, one needs to remember that, from his time as an Illinois State Senator, Obama has always been a strong foe of legislative “influence”. The real problem is getting the very people whose position and status on the gravy train that is Washington, to make any kind of fix whereby that gravy train is derailed, and politics is returned to the American people. It is against their self interest to do so, you see. It’s against their job security and would reduce their incomes, too.

So it is a kind of pragmatic realpolitik we are seeing from Obama which probably isn’t reflective of what he would do if he had a larger, more progressive majority in Congress. The way things are looking, he’s never going to get that – 2010 certainly isn’t going to help any. So he works with what he’s got in Congress, and he knows what he’s got in advance, so he sets up the whole thing in advance to the point where he knew how the whole health care bill would shake down, by making a devil’s deal with big Pharma and the health insurance industry. It isn’t that he doesn’t want strong, vital health care legislation and doesn’t realize that what he’s getting is an incremental baby step and also a giveaway to the corporate world. I’m sure the very thought of it makes him shudder.

What we as caring, progressive people have to do is, in the first place, realize there are some very smart people in the White House who have the benefit of history (1994) to look at, and know what can be done today, and so they set the whole thing up so that, down the road, still a lot of good could come from it. The short term result will be a slap down for the Democratic Party in 2010, whatever Rahm Emanuel is thinking or publicly saying about what passing a bill without a public option or Medicare expansion will mean in terms of votes. I’ve seen the pulse of America on this. The right wing is absolutely apoplectic, Independents have mostly swung their way on this, and true progressives and many liberals are at this point discouraged or angry and probably won’t vote or campaign with the vigor they did in 2008. Sorry, Rahm, that’s the reality of it.

I think Obama knows that. Yet he took a long view, and worked with the Washington he had at his disposal to craft a very imperfect yet still meaningful bill which may in fact be a boon to many Americans four or five years down the road. At any rate, Obama is far from stupid, and may well be “committing a political kamikaze act” in order to lay a framework which will be very fruitful down the line. I do think that regardless of what the public pronouncements are, White House officials realize this is going to be painful for 2010. But maybe worth it. That partly depends on what gets thrashed our in the final language which both branches of Congress work out.

Still, I hate the Senate version as is and am praying that somehow it is reshaped for the better in conference. Even the House version has a lot of defects. So, yes, like so many other liberals, I’m ambivalent about whether I’d even like to see the legislation succeed. At this point I don’t know which would be worse, passing and signing a bill close to what the Senate version is today, or being defeated in getting agreement on a final version or in the final votes. Politically, the latter would be bad for the Democratic Party, but so would “winning” with what we’ve got now from the Senate.

Sometimes Washington seems like a political Kabuki act, where what the public sees and hears (and believes) is far from the reality. Everything gets spun so much these days (and by people with agendas) that the “reality” of a given situation depends mainly on the ideological lens you are viewing it through. Oh, truth exists, even in Washington, but the reality is not much reported in the mainstream media. Sometimes it’s hard to ferret out, and I can’t quite see whether this bill is so flawed that it should be torpedoed dead in the water as is, or if it is a positive step forward. Again, it seems to me that “how things will turn out” is not something ordinary people much concern themselves with in the time frame of five or ten or twenty years down the road. People are perhaps too focused on tomorrow and next week and this year.

Maybe we should be willing to “settle” as Obama is, but it IS galling to see such flawed legislation, given the far superior options which could have been included, even while saving the taxpayers money. What I don’t like is the fact that the White House never intended to fight for a public option. Obama’s point man Rahm had simply decided that the only way to succeed was essentially to surrender to the corporate world at the starting line.

Perhaps the groundwork is being laid for something better farther down the line. But it will have its price.

A note of thanks to the President:

A few days ago I received a personal, hand signed Christmas Card from Barack and Michelle Obama.

I was terribly flattered, but it made me think: don’t they even know who I am in terms of how critical I am of the Obama administration on Evans Liberal Politics? (Perhaps I received the card because of the work I did during the campaign.) I basically trashed him in a short article on my Guide to Liberal and Progressive Politics on the Web. It makes me feel bad and it makes me wonder, too.

Now I don’t quite know what to do with the card, although of course it is a touching gesture. It really bothers me, too. I mean, I don’t like what this administration is doing, I put it all over my website, and the guy sends me a signed Christmas card.

Whatever else one concludes about Barack Obama, he must be a nice guy. Perhaps, too, the card may be his way of saying that, pragmatic as his is, he just may be more progressive personally than his position allows him to be publicly and officially. We progressives might keep that in mind.