Al Franken’s arrival in Washington and seat on the Senate’s Health committee probably won’t be the clincher for the public health option. He and other Democrats spent yesterday downplaying suggestions that a 60 vote majority means that much on any one issue, including health-care reform.

In fact, health-care reform in particular has seemed resistant to both public support and pressure from the White House.

Franken said at a short news conference that he looked forward to helping President Obama get his initiatives through Congress. And since he backed a single payer system during the campaign, we might be tempted to assume his support for for the public option on the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. But one vote is one vote.

Unlike the debate over Medicare in 1964, fence-sitting Senate Democrats are not as vulnerable to a White House arm-twisting campaign orchestrated by a cagey ex-majority leader who knows where all the skeletons are buried. You opposed Lyndon Johnson at your own risk, and even conservative southern Democrats grudglingly went along.

Obama has no such leverage, and Franken’s arrival won’t provide it. I certainly don’t see him convincing hard-line public option opponents such as Louisiana’s Mary Landrieu, and Max Baucus of Montana, who’s been shopping weakened versions of the plan.

By the way, you can find out where specific senators stand on the issue at Howard Dean’s Web site by punching your state into a pull-down menu.

How committed is Franken to health care reform? Very. At the top of his Web page on the issue, he says, “We need to go to universal health care as soon as possible.”

But surprisingly, he seems to have avoided talking about a public option plan specifically. Instead, during the campaign he favored letting the individual states come up with their own versions of universal care. He suggested a Medicare-type plan for all children and adolescents 18 and under, and turning Medicare into a “true single payer system.”

It’ll be interesting to see how Franken modifies his views on actual legislation in the real world of U.S. Senate politics.





