Can he support a public option if states could opt out of the plan, as the current bill provides? “The answer is no,” he says in an interview from his Senate office. “I feel very strongly about this.” How about a trigger, a mechanism for including a public option along with a provision saying it won’t be used unless private insurance plans aren’t spreading coverage far and fast enough? No again.

So any version of a public option will compel Mr. Lieberman to vote against bringing a bill to a final vote? “Correct,” he says.

Consequently, we’re left with 41 senators likely to oppose cloture for a bill with a public option, meaning that unless one of these senators changes his or her stance, there’s no way such a bill can win the 60 votes necessary to overcome a filibuster and receive a final up-or-down vote.

Either someone’s going to have to budge, or we’ll see a revised bill that lacks a public option (but might contain a trigger or another mechanism to pressure insurance companies to contain costs) — or Democrats could attempt to pass a public option through the budget reconciliation process, which requires a simple majority.

Keep checking the Senate Public Option Scoreboard for the latest updates.

It’s not exactly news that Lieberman opposes the public option. In June he was telling reporters that (1) the country can’t afford such a plan and (2) there are plenty of private options out there already, so why create another?

Of note, Lieberman doesn’t sit on either of the Senate committees with jurisdiction over health policy, but he does represent Connecticut, which is a top hub for health insurance companies. Lieberman insists that his opposition to the public plan — anathema to those companies — has nothing to do with protecting the regional industry.

Through it all, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has downplayed the significance of Lieberman’s potential defection.

“I don’t have anyone that I have worked harder with, have more respect for in the Senate than Joe Lieberman,” Reid said Tuesday, according to Roll Call.

Sen. Lieberman will let us get on the bill, and he’ll be involved in the amendment process. … But Joe Lieberman is the least of Harry Reid’s problems.

Reid didn’t specify what those other problems are, but chances are they go by the names Sens. Mary Landrieu (D-La.), Evan Bayh (D-Ind.), Ben Nelson (D-Neb.), Mark Pryor (D-Ark.) and Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.).

Actor Stephen Baldwin said Thursday his older, more-famous brother Alec Baldwin is seriously considering a challenge to Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman.

“Sure, I think Alec has some very interesting ideas that are common sense and logical that he would like to share with folks,” he said. “And the best way to do that is to hold political office.”

But who’s going to play Jack Donaghy?

U.S. Senator Christopher Dodd has been diagnosed with early-stage prostate cancer.

Dodd is scheduled to undergo surgery during the Senate’s August recess and said he expects to be back at work after a “brief recuperation” at home.

“It’s something that’s very common among men my age,” said Dodd, who is 65 and the father of two young daughters. “In fact, one in six men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer at some point during their life.”

Dodd, a Democrat, said he feels fine and intends to run for re-election in November 2010. “As you have probably noticed, I’m working some long and hard hours lately,” he said. “And that will continue.”

Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) and RNC Chairman Michael Steele (WDCpix)

The lengthy speech on health care that Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele delivered on Monday was short on details. Republicans, said Steele, wanted to address “runaway costs,” and had a few ideas on how to do that, such as posting the cost of treatments “openly on the Internet,” supporting “bold new incentives” for medical breakthroughs, and “no life-time health care benefits and insurance for Congressmen who leave their jobs.”

Image by: Matt Mahurin

Most of Steele’s event at the National Press club consisted of scorching attacks on President Obama’s agenda for health care reform, and on the early drafts of health care legislation that have been scored by the Congressional Budget Office at around $1 trillion. Much of the speech had been telegraphed two weeks earlier in a poll conducted for the RNC and a corresponding memo from Alex Castellanos, a Republican media consultant who worked for Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign, which argued that Republicans could kill Democratic plans for health care reform by dragging out the debate. “If we slow this sausage-making process down,” Castellanos wrote, “we can defeat it.” The “key message” for Republicans would be “We’ve got to ‘SLOW DOWN the OBAMA EXPERIMENT WITH OUR HEALTH’.” In his Monday speech, Steele used the word “experiment” or some version of it no fewer than 30 times. In a new television ad airing in North Dakota, Nevada, and Arkansas — all states with at least one Democratic senator on the ballot in 2010–the RNC casts health care reform, again, as a “risky experiment.”

Steele’s performance was less a kick-off, more an amplification of a year-long conservative campaign that is entering its final months without much remaining subtlety. Republicans are in the precarious position of arguing for a “pause button,” as Steele put it, in the ongoing negotiations over health care, while Democrats are aware that any pause or slow-down would effectively kill reform in the 111th Congress. There are Republican alternatives that have no chance of passage; the Patients’ Choice Act sponsored by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), for example, has six co-sponsors. Republicans are testing brand-new health care messaging against Democrats in swing states, while those same Democrats are aware that a failure to pass health care reform would drain their political capital and worsen their chances of re-election in 2010.

“If it doesn’t happen this year it’s not going to happen,” said one House GOP aide. “If too many members have concerns about this in an off-year, even their ranks are only going to grow in an election year.”

It’s been difficult for Republicans to avoid the occasional blunt remark that reveals that fact. High-minded “working groups” on health care reform have given way to an alliance with Rick Scott, the former private hospital CEO who launched Conservatives for Patients’ Rights in March. Scott’s checkered experience in health care — he resigned from Columbia/HCA in 1997 after a $1.7 billion fraud settlement — did not immediately win him many public alliances with the GOP. But by the time Scott appeared at the launch of Sen. Jim DeMint’s (R-S.C.) launch of his own health care plan in June, some Republicans were echoing the message in his TV ads, that Congress needed to slow down the pace of health care reform.

After that event, in a brief conversation with TWI, Scott remarked that “the debate really changed” since he’d launched his group, and that a slow-down of reform would be the end of Democratic plans for health care. “If they don’t get it done by October,” said Scott, “it’s not going to get done.”

The directness of Scott’s campaign backfired a little last week when he co-hosted a conference call with DeMint. On the call, DeMint argued that a Republican victory on health care would “break” Obama and steer political momentum away from Democrats. In a Monday night interview with the News Hour on PBS, the president credited DeMint with saying what Republicans were really thinking. “There is a certain portion of the Republican Party that views this like they saw ’93, ’94, the last time there was a major health-reform effort,” said the president. “They explicitly went after the Clintons, said we’re not going to get this done … it was a pure political play, a show of strength by the Republicans that helped them regain the House.”

All of this puts Republicans in the acrobatic position of throwing up roadblocks to kill health care reform this year while, in the states, attempting to convince vulnerable Democrats that successful health care reform would be a political boondoggle that could end their control of Congress. In conversations with TWI, Republican strategists in the states targeted by the RNC’s new ads had some difficulty squaring the circle. “We all saw what happened the last time there was a major push by a Democratic president and a Democratic Congress to mandate government-run health care,” said Robert Uithoven, a Republican strategist in Nevada. While Uithoven acknowledged that the Democrats of 1994 stumbled by failing to pass any health care reform, he argued that success this year could be a problem, too. “Harry Reid succeeding on this would be disastrous for the country. The more people learn about the cost, the more dangerous it is for Reid to succeed in this effort.”

Bill Vickery, an Arkansas Republican strategist who plans to work for his party’s nominee against Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.), claimed that it would be “politically disastrous” for the senator to support a health care bill with a public plan. “If she votes for it and it passes you say, once again, she sided with the ultra-liberal president, she’s a toady for the administration. If she votes against it, maybe it’s a non-starter politically. And if she votes for it and the bill fails anyway, you make a more nuanced version of that first argument.”

Those arguments run up against the plans of other vulnerable Democrats, who are already running on health care reform. Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.), who has taken the lead on health care legislation in the absence of the ailing Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.), is on the air with ads that feature Kennedy praising Dodd for his work on “the cause of my life.” Former Rep. Rob Simmons (R-Conn.), who is running against Dodd, has an opening if reform falters.

“Dodd believes that whatever legislation he rams through Congress will accrue to his benefit,” said Jim Barnett, Simmons’ campaign manager. “The problem is that voters are judging him on honesty, and nobody trusts him, so he’s staking a lot on the idea he that he’s getting things done in the Senate. If the effort fails or if it’s not all it’s cracked up to be, it will be painful for him.”

Schiff would be disrupting the plans of Rob Simmons, a Republican congressman from 2001 to 2007 who is already running against Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.), but he’d be the latest candidate from the sprawling movement of Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas). Dozens of 2008 Republican candidates (and at least one Democrat) ran on Paul’s banner and ideas, and just this month Paul-endorsed candidate Steve Lonegan lost a heated Republican primary for governor of New Jersey, scoring 41 percent of the vote. When lightning strikes, Paul-backed candidates can raise a lot of money, get media coverage, and shift their GOP rivals to the right.

Credit card reform is long overdue and if Sen. Dodd wasn’t so busy collecting hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign donations from big banks, credit card companies, the pay day loan industry and pawn shops we might have had reform years ago. This bill is a belated improvement on the current system, but has more to do with covering Sen. Dodd’s extremely exposed hind end than with protecting consumers.

Simmons isn’t far off here, on several fronts. Dodd has taken millions of dollars from the banks and other credit card issuers in his 34-year tenure in Washington; he’s struggling in the polls; and although he sponsored a credit card reform bill last year, he declined to hold hearings on it despite being head of the powerful Banking Committee. (House Democrats, by contrast, held a string of hearings before passing a similar bill last September.) Democratic leaders, by pushing Dodd’s bill so prominently, clearly hope to improve his public image as a way to help him keep his seat.

What’s inane about Simmon’s statement is the implication that Republicans somehow have a greater appetite for finance reforms than Dodd does –  as if Congress under former Sen. Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) or former Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Texas) — (not to mention a White House under President George W. Bush — ever took seriously the concept of protecting consumers from the traps and schemes often used by credit card companies. Instead, it’s Republican senators who watered down Dodd’s bill in recent weeks, and it’s Republican senators who are right now threatening to kill the proposal, in order to protect the banks.

Simmons knows all of this. Indeed, he was a member of Congress for six years between 2001 and 2007, when the GOP was in the majority — just enough time to rack up nearly $119,000 in donations from the same finance industry he’s accusing Dodd of coddling, according to the campaign finance watchdog, Center for Responsive Politics.

Then again, if hypocrisy were a crime, the Capitol would be empty.

That’s not great news for the embattled Dodd, who is fighting for his political life in the face of a 33 percent approval rating and a 2010 reelection challenge from former Rep. Rob Simmons (R-Conn.). But even if the five-term senator doesn’t have too many fans in Connecticut, they love him at Intercontinental Exchange, one of the nation’s leading exchanges trading credit default swaps and other risky financial instruments.

Executives at Intercontinental (known as ICE) donated $18,400 to Dodd’s reelection campaign during the first quarter of this year, according to the senator’s report to the Federal Election Commission this week.

That’s more than four times the amount that Connecticut residents contributed to Dodd.

And ICE has good reason to cultivate a friendship with the Banking Committee chief. The company was recently approved by government regulators to begin “clearing” trades of derivatives, the risky financial instruments that helped take down AIG and were estimated last year to exceed the real value of the whole world’s financial holdings. ICE now has an interest in ensuring that derivatives trading remains supervised by a small group of firms, thus maximizing its ability to profit from the market.

But ICE isn’t the only company outdoing Connecticut natives in generosity to Dodd. Six employees of the lobbying firm Patton Boggs gave the senator’s campaign $5,500 on a single day during the first quarter, and employees of the financial services company Chesterfield pitched in $6,900.

So Dodd has an impressive number of supporters … just not that many who can vote for him next year.

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Though Dodd has already raised more than $1 million in 2009 — a handsome sum that places him well ahead of the Republicans he could face in next year’s election — only five individual donations came from Connecticut residents. From the Connecticut Post:

The five-term incumbent reported raising just $4,250 from five Connecticut residents during the first three months of the year while raking in $604,745 from nearly 400 individuals living outside the state.

Indeed, he received more from individuals residing in 18 other states than he did from those living in his own.

He took in $90,795 from Massachusetts residents, $81,550 from Texas, $56,150 from Maryland, and $53,400 from New York.

Dodd also collected $437,407 from political action committees, including two based in Connecticut that contributed $7,000. He took in $2,271 from individuals contributing less than $200 each.

A Quinnipiac University poll released earlier in the month found Dodd trailing former GOP Rep. Rob Simmons, the likely Republican nominee, by 16 points. None of this spells good things for the Democrats, who’ve got eyes on picking up Senate seats in 2010, not losing those that have been safe for decades.

For comparison, I dug up a presentation (PDF) by Obama campaign manager David Plouffe from the same month.

The result: The Obama campaign was spot-on in its assessment of its prospects, while the McCain people were way off the mark. Let’s take a look.

First, here’s Davis’ perceived electoral map, just four months ago:

Looking at today’s RealClearPolitics map (below), we can see that every single toss-up state is now in Sen. Barack Obama’s column. While all the “Lean GOP” states have held, three of the “Solid GOP” states — Virginia, North Carolina and Indiana — have turned blue:

Meanwhile, Plouffe was announcing the Obama team’s plan to turn these red states blue:

Lo and behold, every one of these is now in Obama’s column, mostly by substantial margins.

Another slide in Plouffe’s presentation indicated the states in which the Obama campaign would be advertising early and extensively:

Admittedly, a few of these are still unlikely to go for Obama — Alaska, for instance, effectively came off the table when Gov. Sarah Palin joined Sen. John McCain’ticket — but for the most part, Obama’s strategy paid off.

Here’s proof:

Virginia, North Carolina and Indiana, which McCain considered in the bag, now lean Obama by 7, 2 and 2 points, respectively, according to RealClearPolitics.

Connecticut, which McCain hoped to nab, is going for Obama by 19 points.