Deadlines, Obama explained, help end the “hand-wringing” that dominated Washington before his arrival. Even if the clock ran out on his plan this summer, he had created some much-needed pressure.

“Now, if there are no deadlines, nothing gets done in this town. If somebody comes to me and says, it’s basically done; it’s going to spill over by a few days or a week — you know, that’s different,” was how Obama put it to Jim Lehrer in mid-July.

It’s actually been 18 weeks and three days since the Senate left for its August break, and Majority Leader Harry Reid’s caucus is in a state of greater disunity now than when Obama was shrugging off missing a deadline because the agreement was imminent.

Except for a few bubbles of optimism when Democrats quit talking about the details of health care and focused on how sweet it would be to score such a big win over Republicans, we’ve seen the Super Bowl of hand-wringing in Washington.

There has not been meaningful debate or useful discussion, but rather the same baloney being sliced in different ways. There is still no consensus on how to expand coverage or how to pay for it, which are the same problems that existed when Obama first called for action in his Feb. 23 address to a joint session of Congress — 294 days ago.

A plan so sweeping, so expensive and so unpopular has simply proved more than the Senate can handle, especially when Obama has steadfastly refused to be as specific about what he wants in the bill as when he wants it passed.

The House blithely approved a whopper of a health plan. But as Democrats in swing districts announce their retirements and the party keeps slipping in the polls, Nancy Pelosi seems caught in a political kamikaze mission.

After the August deadline was broken in the Senate, Reid and the White House whipped through a series of new deadlines, including Columbus Day and Thanksgiving. Each one was said to be valuable in terms of focusing debate, but all ultimately proved useless.

The White House has lately taken to saying that the real deadline was the end of the year all along. This would allow Obama to herald the plan in his State of the Union speech next month, at which time we’re told that he intends to cast himself as a budget hawk.

But to strike that unlikely pose, Obama needs the Senate to finish with health care before Christmas. But the yuletide deadline is now slipping as lawmakers await a cost estimate on a new version of the bill.

If Majority Leader Harry Reid had the 60 votes needed to break a filibuster, he could start the process on a final vote today and be headed back to Las Vegas on Dec. 21 as a big winner. But the votes aren’t there, and starting the process now would result in a stinging defeat.

Reid was jazzed last week when 10 senators he selected to negotiate a new plan agreed that the thing to do was ditch the idea of a government-run insurance program — the heart of the Obama plan — and just expand Medicare.

That would be as if the contractor struggling with the roof on your new house suggested that he tear down what he’d already built and just set up a trailer for you.

And Medicare wouldn’t even be a double-wide model. It is tens of trillions of dollars in the red, and doctors and hospitals are already fleeing its measly payments and bureaucratic snarls.

It seemed inevitable that the Democratic supermajority would eventually get something passed on health care, if only through an utter indifference to quality.

But this process has been grinding on so long to so little effect that if the CBO pans the idea of expanding Medicare, Obama may find that time is really up for his plan.

Chris Stirewalt is the political editor of The Washington Examiner. He can be reached at [email protected].