President Obama is going to address another Congressional gathering today. The audience will be more friendly this time: It will be the Senate Democratic caucus. But the stakes will be just as high as they were when Obama spoke to Republican House members last week.

Health care is bound to come up at the meeting. I assume Obama will raise it during his prepared remarks; if not, he'll get questions about it. And the big controversy right now is whether the Senate is willing to amend its bill through the budget reconciliation process. It's the only way to make changes to health care at this point, since the Republicans have vowed to filibuster the final vote--and, thanks to the election of Scott Brown in Massachusetts, they have the forty-one votes necessary to sustain it. (In reconciliation, a minority can't block the final vote.) And such changes appear to be necessary, because the House has made clear it won't approve the Senate's bill without some changes.

The problem is that Senate Democrats aren't very happy about taking a reconciliation vote right now. Some worry that the move smacks of partisan politics at a time when the public wants, or says it wants, bipartisanship. Some worry it will seem like trying to bend legislative rules, at a time when voters are clearly angry about the deals Democrats made with special interest groups and some of their own members in order to pass the original bill. And some just want to be done with health care reform, because voters are clearly tired of it and want to hear about jobs instead.

The anxiety is, as you might expect, most pronounced among senators who represent more conservative states and/or are up for re-election this year. Arkansas Senator Blanche Lincoln, who is probably the most vulnerable Democrat running this year, has made clear she'd prefer not to take a reconciliation vote on health care. Her Arkansas colleague, Mark Pryor, has said similar things, as have Indiana Senator Evan Bayh and Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu. The Democrats can afford up to nine defections and still prevail. But you can conjure up five possible to probable "no" votes pretty quickly--in addition to Bayh, Landrieu, Lincoln, and Pryor you'd include Connecticut's Joe Lieberman.*

The best arguments for moving forward are the ones all of us have been discussing over the last week. All of these senators voted for health care reform already. Republicans will attack them for it no matter what. Their best bet is to pass the bill into law, since that will give them an accomplishment they can tout and clear tangible benefits they show to voters. (As Kevin Drum noted in a must-read analysis, this isn't merely speculative. New polling data suggests Democrats do no worse--and perhaps a little better--politically if they pass a bill. And I'd argue the poll question actually understates the jump, since there's no way for people to know how they'll vote ten months from now.)

Voting for reconciliation will also change the media narrative and clear a path for passing more legislation going forward, even with a "mere" majority of 59 votes.

But there is at least one other reason the Senate ought to go forward with reconciliation.

I'm preoccupied with reporting, so I'm outsourcing my mid-day commentary to Kevin Drum, who always has smart things to say:

A sign that the unemployment rate has peaked.

Geithner: 85% of the $205 billion in bank bailout money to be repaid by end of 2010.

Should the Fed buy an additional $2 trillion in Treasuries?

Readers may have noticed that the "Daily Treatment" isn't really daily. Instead, it's daily when I have time to write it, which isn't as often as I would like. And that's unfortunate.

It means I don't get to chance to highlight many worthy articles--or, more important, to thank, implicitly, the writers and thinkers whose work influences me. So today I'm bringing the Daily Treatment back, but offering an extended holiday version--one in which I can give thanks to...

Julie Appleby, Mary Agnes Carey, Philip Galewitz, and Jordan Rau for asking, and answering, the questions most Americans actually care about

Carrie Budoff Brown for her relentless, indispensable coverage

Brian Beutler for being impervious to spin (and nearly impervious to bullets)

Michael Cannon for keeping me honest

Kevin Drum for staying healthy

Via Matt Yglesias, I see that Alec MacGillis had an interesting piece on this question in yesterday's Washington Post. There are a variety of ways the administration could target employment directly, of course, from a WPA-style federal jobs program to tax credits that subsidize hiring.

Kevin Drum thinks people, including myself, are being too hard on the Obama team when it comes to AfPak policymaking:

If [Rajiv] Chandrasekar's account is correct, the fault isn't really with the Obama administration at all.  It's with the military: McKiernan was on board with the counterinsurgency strategy but didn't indicate that he needed more troops to implement it....

Later, of course, McKiernan was pushed out and a new commander took a fresh look at what resources were needed.  But that hardly reflects badly on Obama, and it doesn't really sound like anyone screwed up back in March.  Long story short, the military changed its mind about troop levels between March and September, and now Obama has to decide how to respond to that.  I don't really see a case for ineptness here...

Here's the problem: There are, or should be, plenty of people in the Obama administration who understand how much manpower the counterinsurgency approach implied by their March policy review would require. Here's what COIN guru John Nagl was saying back in February, before the review was completed:

As the Dog Days of August descended upon us, there developed across the progressive chattering classes a deep sense of malaise bordering on depression, if not panic--much of it driven by fears about the leadership skills of Barack Obama. The polling numbers seemed to weaken every day, and Democratic unease was matched by growing glee on the airwaves of Fox and in Republican circles everywhere. 

Within ten weeks, however, Obama was elected president and joy returned to the land. 

To be honest, I've never been terribly interested in the long-running pseudo-debate over whether global warming "stopped" in 1998. If you don't know what I'm talking about, here's the dime version: 1998 was an exceptionally hot El Niño year, we're all agreed.

Over at Washington Monthly, Kevin Drum has whipped himself into a populist frenzy about American Airlines' new $15 checked luggage fee: