If you would like to be satisfied with Senate majority leader Harry Reid's position on healthcare reform, please select from the following menu:

28 July: "What I think should be in the bill is something that I will vote for according to my conscience when we get this bill to the floor. ... But I have a responsibility to get a bill to the Senate floor that will get 60 votes that we can proceed toward. That's my number one responsibility."

28 August: "I am in favour of the public option. ... There's a lot of people who misunderstand this. They think it's some government programme. But there are many ways we can do it. One would be to have an entity like Medicare. I really don't favour that. I think what we should have is a private entity that ... has direction from the federal government, so that people who don't fall within the parameters of being able to get insurance from their employer, they would have a place to go."

10 September: "If we can come up with a concept of a co-operative that does just that, that is, it makes more competition and makes insurance companies honest, yes, I think that would fit the bill."

24 September: A "trigger" by which there would only be a public option if insurance companies fail to meet unspecified conditions is "a pretty doggone good idea".

1 October: "Remember, a public option is a relative term. ... There's a public option, there's a public option and there's a public option. And we're going to look at each of them."

To recap: Reid supports whatever can get 60 votes. He also supports the public option, so long as it's private, a co-op, a trigger and finally, an ethereal concept.

Reid sat on his hands while the Senate finance committee frittered away the last few months mauling its healthcare legislation into a gift for the insurance industry. Interfering with committee work just isn't Reid's style.

Yet as soon as he learned that the bill would force Nevada, the nation's cheapest state, to spend more money to expand its stingy Medicaid programme, Reid was suddenly demanding – and getting – changes in the legislation. Then he crowed and crowed about his magnificent influence to the voters back home where he trails second- and third-tier Republican challengers in his bid for re-election.

It is up to Reid to merge the finance committee's Insurance Industry Coddling Act of 2009 and the more promising reform bill that passed the Senate health, education, labour and pensions committee, and speculation is rampant as to what Reid will or won't include in the bill he takes to the Senate floor or fight for in a House-Senate conference, particularly with regard to a strong public option.

I'm going to refrain from such speculation. I will, however, hazard a guess as to how the choice will be made: Reid's decision will not be based on what reform would be best for the country or on whether he can get his (questionably necessary) 60 votes. Instead, Reid's actions will hinge on a callous calculation of what is in his own individual political best interest as he sees it, based on his keen sense of an electorate that he was last in touch with in, oh, maybe 1998.

With luck, the opportunist's hackneyed political judgment will just happen to coincide with good public policy. I put the odds at about 50-50.