Morning Must Reads — Off Message. Off Balance. Just Plain Off.

Muddy is an understatement. In trying to get the health debate back under control, the White House has made a total hash of the discussion.

The good news for team Obama is that no one is talking about who gets to “pull the plug on granny.” The bad news is that the one point on which the president was clear about health care – he wanted a new national health plan funded in part by cuts in Medicare – is now another mystery.

The secretary of health and the White House press secretary expressed openness to non-profit, highly regulated, private health co-ops designed on the template of public utilities. The president himself downplayed the importance of a new national plan as “a tiny sliver” of what needed to be done.

Now, liberals are outraged and say they can deliver the votes in the House and Senate to kill any bill that doesn’t have such a component. And since the White House is now trying to disavow any support for the option it’s actually open to the administration can’t start making the sales pitch for co-ops to moderates and conservatives.

What a mess.

As Blue Dog Allen Boyd told a crowd in his Florida district Monday, it’s probably time for Democrats to just start over on health care. It’s a position overwhelmingly held by American voters.

The Obama administration is still pressing to get something passed and many liberals still believe that even a flawed plan is worth passing just for the sake of getting some new entitlement in place that can eventually be expanded and empowered.

But by trying an end run, the White House has aroused so many suspicions that nothing that comes out of this process will be celebrated.

Writers Robert Pear and Gardiner Harris look at how other cooperatives have worked and found mixed results and long lead times before results.

If the White House were able to be selling the co-op idea, the biggest question would be “What happens when it doesn’t work?” If the public option swoops in, it’s a no-go for moderates and conservatives. If it doesn’t, liberals might really stay away.

“Insurers have strenuously opposed Mr. Obama’s call for a new government-run insurance plan. Karen M. Ignagni, president of America’s Health Insurance Plans, a trade group, was no more receptive to the idea of co-ops on Monday.

’How will the cooperative be structured?’ Ms. Ignagni asked. ‘What are the regulatory requirements? It may sound benign, but it may use administered prices. I’m not sure it solves any problems.’

Senator Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah, said he saw the differences as more semantic than substantive. “You can call it a co-op, which is another way of saying a government plan,” Mr. Hatch said.

Los Angeles Times — Afghanistan’s Hamid Karzai scrambles to hold on

Writer Laura King finds plenty of trouble in Kabul for Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who has been making desperation plays to hold on to power in Thursday’s election.

As Examiner colleague Julie Mason observes today , President Obama is making a huge bet on the ability of Karzai to hold the fraying country together. By adopting the belligerent tones of a war president in a speech Monday, Obama now not only owns the Afghan war, but left himself little room to climb down from his tough new rhetoric.

But the man who will likely be tasked with creating the kind of civilized state that Obama could be proud of is running away from the U.S. as he cuts deals with warlords and tribal leaders that have his government looking the other way in exchange for votes.

The deals have tarnished Karzai’s image at home and abroad and given some hope to his chief challenger, Abdullah Abdullah, who would be in a strong position to win if it weren’t for the profusion of minor candidates fracturing the electorate.

“On the last day of campaigning, the Karzai and Abdullah camps were again a study in contrasts.

Abdullah, who once served as Karzai’s foreign minister, began the morning with the stadium rally in Kabul, the capital. He then flew off for a last round of barnstorming, this time in a troubled eastern province.

Karzai spent much of the day, as he often does, sequestered in the presidential palace. Through weeks of the campaign, he appeared at only a handful of rallies, usually highly orchestrated affairs packed with handpicked supporters.

The biggest problem for Karzai, though, is that he seems unable to articulate a larger vision for the country or even to explain why he wants another term.

Questions about why he is running often solicit a rambling reply centered on what clearly were his glory days: his daring and dangerous return to the southern city of Kandahar when it was still under Taliban control.

Abdullah, meanwhile, has been capitalizing on a crisply articulated call for change.

‘Give me the power and I will give it back to you!’ he told the stadium crowd Monday, which roared its approval.”

Wall Street Journal — DOJ Shifts Tone on Marriage Act
 

The Obama administration delivered on a promise to sound better while doing nothing for its gay supporters by making an intentionally weak case for the Defense of Marriage Act in court.

Paralyzed by the collision between political reality and platitudinous promises, the Obama Justice Department had something of a pout on Monday, telling the judge on a suit challenging the Clinton-era law that defines marriage as a union between one man and one woman that DOMA was “discriminatory” but legal and therefore worthy of defense.

The president even issued a statement lamenting his administration’s legal defense of a law with which he disagrees – even though the president still opposes gay marriage.

But gay groups were so livid at the administration for making a stronger defense of the act in court this spring, the president obviously felt obliged to highlight his administration’s poor showing this week.

As writer Evan Perez shows, just as on health care, Team Obama is suffering from overloaded expectations and underwhelming execution.

“Gay-rights groups have complained that Mr. Obama has been slow to move on pledges he made as a candidate to repeal policies deemed discriminatory against gay people. Among those: the military’s ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy, which prohibits openly gay people from serving in the military, and the Defense of Marriage Act, which allows states to ignore same-sex unions from other states and bars the federal government from granting marriage benefits to couples in such unions…

The new tack doesn’t go far enough to tackle discrimination, one gay-rights activist said. Joe Solmonese, president of the Human Rights Campaign, a gay-rights group, said in a statement: ‘While they contend that it is the DOJ’s duty to defend an act of Congress, we contend that it is the administration’s duty to defend every citizen from discrimination.’”

Washington Post — Unemployment Spike Compounds Foreclosure Crisis
 

How’s the economy? Better? Worse? Unchanged? Economists think it’s a little better. Voters think it’s getting worse or stagnating.
Writer Renae Merle looks at why that might be so. Unemployment is up, which drives foreclosures up, which, in turn, decreases the value of other homes.

Instead of joblessness as a lagging indicator, some economists think that it could be a leading indicator of the next wave of real-estate-related recession.

And with voters feeling the burn, lawmakers aren’t listening to the economists saying “hold on,” they’re thinking about floating new mortgage programs and spending more money they don’t have.

“The country’s growing unemployment is overtaking subprime mortgages as the main driver of foreclosures, according to bankers and economists, threatening to send even higher the number of borrowers who will lose their homes and making the foreclosure crisis far more complicated to unwind.

Economists estimate that 1.8 million borrowers will lose their homes this year, up from 1.4 million last year, according to Moody’s Economy.com. And the government, which has already committed billions of dollars to foreclosure-prevention efforts, has found it far more difficult to help people who have lost their paychecks than those whose mortgage payments became unaffordable because of an interest-rate increase.”

Wall Street Journal — Obama Shuts Email Tip List
 

It’s been a bad summer for the administration – the dropping polls, the beer summit, the look of fear in Arlen Specter’s eyes.

But the moment that may stand out most in the hindsight of history may be the decision by a political office functionary to ask Americans to turn in email “disinformation” and “fishy” claims about health care to the White House.

Aside from being a scary, Stasi-style tactic, it showed how unprepared the Obama team was for the difference between campaigning and governing.

The administration turned off [email protected] on Monday, but the use of the program will remain as evidence of an inappropriate use of power — angering conservatives and making modertaes feel a little uneasy with what was either a boneheaded move or a creepy play.

Writer Amy Schatz has details:

“The White House shut down an email account “flag(at)whitehouse.gov” as congressional Republicans and bloggers continued to raise questions about why Obama officials were collecting negative statements made by ordinary Americans about the president’s health care plan and what the administration was planning to do with the information it gathered.

On Monday, California Rep. Darrell Issa, the top Republican on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, asked the White House to clarify what it plans to do with the ‘fishy’ information collected, raising concerns about ‘the potentially chilling effect the White House’s request…may have on Free Speech rights.’”

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