After a weekend of furious activity, Democratic leaders in the Senate think they are close to getting the votes they need in order to pass an "opt-out" version of the public option.

But they feel like President Obama could be doing more to help them, with one senior staffer telling TNR on Sunday that the leadership would like, but has yet to receive, a clear "signal" of support for their effort.

The White House, for its part, says President Obama supports a strong public option, as he always has--and that, as one senior administration official puts it, the president will support the Senate leadership in "whichever way" it chooses to go on this particular question.

Read those statements carefully and you'll see they don't actually contradict each other. Instead, they offer a pretty good picture of where the public option debate is at the beginning of a week that could quite possibly decide its fate.

For those just tuning in, the underlying issue here is whether to create a government-run insurance program into which people could enroll voluntarily and that might, ideally, provide more affordable coverage while providing the private insurance industry with much-needed competition. As recently as two or three weeks ago, many observers (this writer included) thought the idea was more or less dead politically.