So the public option is now being jettisoned by our earnest and sincere president like so much ballast that was carried this far on the voyage only so that it could be heaved overboard at the right time.

At a town hall in Grand Junction, Colorado Saturday, Mr. Obama seemed to downplay the necessity of having a public insurance option in the final version of any health care reform legislation presented to him by Congress.

“The public option – whether we have it or we don’t have it – is not the entirety of health care reform,” the President said. “This is just one sliver of it, one aspect of it. And, by the way, it’s both the right and the left that have become so fixated on this that they forget everything else…”

Who could have seen this coming?

I hereby renew my call for official White House benchmarks for assessing the success of healthcare reform efforts. If the White House doesn’t tell us how to define success, how will we ever be able to recognize the grand success that is no doubt waiting to greet us with open arms, just around the next corner?