Just Pass SOMETHING!

That's pretty much the message from the White House regarding Obamacare and it's not sitting well with many Democrats:

More than anything else in Barack Obama’s presidency so far, health reform has exposed a get-a-deal-at-any-cost side of Obama that infuriates his party’s progressives.

And as Democrats tried to salvage health reform Tuesday, some liberals could barely hide their sense of betrayal that the White House and congressional Democrats have been willing to cut deals and water down what they consider the ideal vision of reform.

“The Senate version is not worth passing,” former Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean told POLITICO, referring to plans to strip the latest compromise from the bill, a Medicare buy-in. “I think in this particular iteration, this is the end of the road for reform.”

Dean said there are some good elements in the bill, but lawmakers should pull the plug and revisit the issue in Obama’s second term, unless Democrats are willing to shortcut a GOP filibuster. “No one will think this is health care reform. This is not even insurance reform,” he said.

The White House pushed back hard at liberals’ complaints Tuesday, with Obama talking up what’s in the plan but not saying a word about what’s been left out:

A single-payer plan, a public option, a state “opt-out” of the public option, a trigger and a Medicare buy-in — all ideas pushed by Democrats and blessed by Obama at various times but now gone from the bill.

But it’s not just the liberal base that’s feeling unsettled. Obama has also proved frustrating to moderates, who simply wanted to know where Obama’s core principles on health care stood, all the better to cut a deal to the president’s liking.

Time and again, he rebuffed Democrats’ requests to speak up more forcefully about what he wanted — a strategy that allowed Obama to preserve maximum flexibility to declare victory at the end of the process, no matter what the final bill looked like.

Obama cannot afford to allow his signature issue to die. He wants to stand up in front of Congress for his first State of the Union and claim credit for fixing health care. That's why I'm pretty much convinced that they'll pass something, even if it doesn't do anything they originally promised and causes more problems than it fixes, just to claim a victory.