The White House is, I suspect, coordinating this campaign to undercut the public option and make it go away. It’s a controversial campaign promise, and as we’ve written before, President Obama generally doesn’t like to keep controversial promises. In this case, it seems the White House is finally doing something on health care reform, unfortunately what it’s doing is undercutting its own promises and its own constituencies. Remember, it was only two months ago that President Obama himself said that the public option was so necessary that he wouldn’t sign a bill that didn’t include it. Today, the White House, and its Hill allies, are telling us that the public option was just an insignificant component of the bill that can easily be replaced with something else. From everything I’ve read, that’s simply untrue. It’s no wonder the public option is having a difficult time getting votes in the Senate, the White House doesn’t seem to be lobbying for it at all, and never did – which again, is odd, since the president devoted so much time to it in his address to Congress just a few days ago.