“We have 60 votes on paper,” Senator Harry Reid, the majority leader, said Wednesday in an interview. “But we cannot bulldoze anybody; it doesn’t work that way. My caucus doesn’t allow it. And we have a very diverse group of senators philosophically. I am not this morning suddenly flexing my muscles.”…

“One or two could peel off on any issue,” said Mr. Reid, who has seen the ranks of his party swell by 15 in the past two elections.

That said, Reid’s comments raise a broader question: How much should Dems worry about the emerging Republican line right now, which is to raise expectations by pointing out that Dems now own the government — and its failures? As RNC chair Michael Steele put it: “I can say without hesitation that this government is totally theirs now, and everything that comes out of it and everything that results from it is on their plate.”

Why run away from this? Some Dems might point out a better response: “Damn right — everything we accomplish is the result of Democratic rule.” After all, Steele is right. The public did hand Dems a mandate to govern. Rather than worry about how the GOP is playing the “expectations game,” the other option is for Dems to embrace the public’s expectations of them, own their accomplishments, and seize on the GOP line to point out even Republicans are admitting that they’re irrelevant now.

RE: The possibility of not bringing a public option to the floor. That's likely the preferred method for shielding "centrist" Dems from such a vote. Where to keep your eyes? If the HELP committee reports out the bill they've been promising, with a public option included, and the Finance committee doesn't, who reconciles the two and decides which package gets to the floor?

Harry Reid does.

In the FISA Senate battle at the end of 2007, the Intelligence committee and the Judiciary committee reported out different versions of the bill. That case, though, involved a sequential referral of a House bill, and Reid said he was relying on the custom of bringing up the bill that came out of the committee to get the first referral as the base bill, though the option was open to him as Majority Leader to change direction. But it at least made some sense, even if it was obvious that there was a conscious choice to refer the bill to the more receptive of the two committees first.

Health care isn't a referral, though. These are two original Senate bills competing for consideration. The Majority Leader has considerably more flexibility on this. He'll be guided by the chairmen of the committees in this, of course. But you'll learn an awful lot about who stands where if HELP includes a public option, Finance doesn't, and neither does whatever comes to the floor.