The beginning of bipartisan legislation.

[Felix The Assassin]

Well he did envision a bipartisanship tenure.

President Obama's campaign for health care reform by this fall, once considered highly likely to succeed, suddenly appears in real jeopardy.

Top White House advisers, especially chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, are still privately predicting massive changes to the health care system in 2009. But for the first time, Democrats on Capitol Hill and in the administration are expressing frank worries about stronger-than-expected opposition from moderate Democrats and worse-than-expected estimates for how much the plan could cost.

Business groups, which had embraced the idea of reform and have been meeting quietly with Democrats for months in an effort to shape the legislation, now talk of spending millions of dollars to oppose the latest proposals out of Capitol Hill. And Democrats themselves are not united, with leading party figures making contradictory declarations about how far they should go to overhaul the system when deficits are soaring and prospects for an economic recovery remain cloudy.

And top Democratic officials tell POLITICO they are increasingly pessimistic about getting any more Republican votes than they did on the stimulus package, with some aides referring to the idea of a bipartisan bill as "fool's gold" — an unattainable waste of time.

“This was always going to be messy,” said a senior administration strategist. “It got messy faster and earlier than people thought. But none of it is anything that’s going to stop it.”

Emanuel is anxious for the president to sign the new law by October so that Democrats have a year to campaign on it ahead of congressional midterms, aides say. Administration officials concede the new kinks in the schedule make that harder.

It has been conventional wisdom Obama would overcome a sluggish start by congressional Democrats to win approval of his plan this fall — perhaps even backed by a notable number of Republicans. But there is a growing list of reasons this conventional wisdom could be wrong:

Money troubles
Public anxiety about red ink — muted during this winter’s debate over an economic stimulus package — has come roaring back, with a Gallup Poll showing deficits and spending as the only issues where more people disapprove of Obama’s performance than approve of it.

Republicans think the “borrow and spend” issue may be the biggest single vulnerability for Obama and the Democrats in the midterm congressional elections of 2010 and the presidential year of 2012. The president’s own advisers privately agree.

That’s one of the reasons Obama is emphasizing what he calls “savings” — otherwise known as cuts — that would help pay for his plans.

That is why Democrats admit that it was a public relations disaster this week when the Congressional Budget Office issued a report this week concluding, from a partial draft of a Senate health committee bill, that the plan would cost $1 trillion over 10 years but only provide coverage for 16 million of the estimated 50 million Americans who are uninsured.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a member of the health committee, said on Fox News Thursday that he considers the CBO finding “a devastating blow to the administration’s plan.”

Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) now says Democrats will need to come up with a bill that costs less than $1 trillion — but many liberals say it would be meaningless to do something that small and leave so many people still uninsured.

A crowded stage
Everyone has big ideas for changing the health care system — and many lawmakers have waited years, in some cases their entire careers — to put their stamp on it.

That’s why you have clashing Democratic ideas from Obama, Sen. Ted Kennedy (Mass.), Baucus, Rep. Henry Waxman (Calif.) and many others.

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0609/23906.html