Yes, I'm faint with hope here!

Agreed!

Maybe this has something to do with why Lieberman got off easy.

(And you thought we'd get through a thread without Ole' Joe! HA!)

If Daschle can change the tenor of the argument, it'll go a long way to getting it done

I agree. That's why I like the FAA analogy. It just makes perfect sense, and would really put to sleep the whole "socialism" argument. Plus, when opponents start screaming about RATIONING HEALTH CARE ZOMG GRANNY COULD DIE BECAUSE OF RATIONED HEALTH CARE!@@#$$!! the FAA analogy could work there, as well.

And from the Atlantic:
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200611/green-hillary/3

The Clintons considered several legislative options before settling on a clever, but risky, strategy that seemed by then to be their best hope of getting a bill through Congress. An anonymous administration official quoted in a Time column had earlier belittled the petulant chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, Daniel Patrick Moynihan (“We’ll roll right over him if we have to”), who should have played a critical role. The decision was made to try to attach health care instead to the annual budget reconciliation bill. Theoretically, this offered a number of advantages. The reconciliation bill is the single most important piece of legislation Congress passes each year, because it locks in the spending and legislative changes in the budget—it simply must pass, or the government shuts down. As such, it is accorded special procedural shortcuts: it requires only a simple majority vote in both chambers of Congress, and, tantalizing from the administration’s standpoint, Senate rules permit just twenty hours of debate, so the bill can’t be filibustered. (Ronald Reagan used the reconciliation bill of 1981 to drastically shift spending from domestic programs to defense.)

What this strategy didn’t account for was the considerable ego of Senator Robert C. Byrd, the West Virginia Democrat who was then chairman of the Appropriations Committee, through which the reconciliation bill would pass. Byrd worships the Senate the way some cultures worship their ancestors, believing that the Founders’ ideas live on in its arcane rules and procedures. He has a flair for windy oratory—nothing clears the Senate floor like his annual perorations celebrating Mother’s Day or the first day of spring. The author of a four-volume history of the Senate, he holds strong views about what should, and should not, be permitted. And he has the means to impose them on others.

Byrd felt the Clinton strategy violated the spirit of the budget reconciliation bill by trying to attach something to it that had nothing to do with the budget. In the mid-1980s he had established the “Byrd rule,” which forbade just this sort of tampering with the bill. Health care “was a big piece of legislation, it was important—it ought to have been debated,” he told me recently. “I certainly was abhorrent of the idea of ramming this piece of legislation through by that mechanism.” A succession of eminences led by Jay Rockefeller pleaded with him to relent. The president called him. Byrd wouldn’t budge. The elaborate plan to circumvent the establishment collapsed under the stern gaze of its senior member. “I was the bear trap,” Byrd told me, with a twinkle of defiant pride.