Let's give a warm welcome to another Cassandra:

Despite an abundance of public remarks, Obama's actual strategy to achieve health-care reform still remains largely cloaked in secrecy. While the media's focus has been on the unseemly public wrangling in Congress, the White House has been doing two things: 1) Trying to influence legislators behind closed doors and 2) Making deals with industry leaders behind closed doors.

And disturbingly, the crucial endgame will apparently be played behind closed doors, as well. In a conference call with bloggers last month, Obama anticipated that the bills that eventually emerge from the House and Senate will, even then, still leave the most controversial issues basically undecided.

"Eighty percent of those two bills will overlap. There's going to be 20 percent that will be different in terms of how it will be funded, its approach to the public plan, its pay-or-play provisions," he said. But those are precisely the issues that all the arguments have basically been about for months now.

"Conference is where these differences will get ironed out," Obama said. But conference is the last great smoke-filled room of our deliberative democracy. After the House and Senate have ostensibly debated everything in public, their representatives in conference committee get to make all the really big decisions in secret. Conference is also notoriously where the big-buck corporate lobbyists do their best work - in the dark, like cockroaches.

Eventually, however, a White-House brokered deal will emerge from the back rooms. And one of two things will happen.

One possibility is that Obama, to everyone's surprise, will come out with a strong bill much like the one he promised his supporters during the campaign. It is conceivable, after all, that the reason Obama hasn't publicly issued ultimatums and twisted arms and busted heads is that he believes it's best to do those things in private -- and only when the time is truly ripe. In this scenario, which I call the Obama-as-community-organizer scenario, the community's needs are finally met, but in a way such that even those who had thwarted the people's will are allowed to save face.

The other possibility -- well, I call that one the Obama-as-pushover scenario. In this one, Obama will come out of it having given away the store -- having neither significantly improved the health-care system nor lowered its costs, but rather having created a new entitlement that primarily benefits the health insurance, pharmaceutical and hospital industries.

So far, the glimpses we've seen from behind all those closed doors suggest the latter scenario....

If the health-care deal that emerges benefits the health care industry more than it does ordinary Americans, Obama is likely to argue that the agreement was by necessity a compromise. But keep in mind that Obama went into the entire debate having taken a fairly dramatic compromise position to start with. The most effective way to achieve universal coverage and bring down health care costs - Obama's two ostensible holy grails -- is, of course, a single-payer system. But Obama unilaterally ruled out creating an actual government-run health-care system - rather than a mythological one -- on pragmatic political grounds [see here], before the public debate even began.

Does Obama have the ability to stand up to corporate interests? There's scant evidence of that so far. Indeed, most notably in the course of the financial industry bailout*, he deferred to them quite spectacularly. ...

Accountability journalism... More like this, please!

NOTE Again, as I think Ian Welsh pointed out, though I can't find the link, the people who followed the bailouts closely in real time tend to be far less trusting of the administration than those who did not. That's the opportunity cost of makign the horse race the be-all and end-all of coverage in 2008.