Harold Pollack is a professor at the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration and Special Correspondent for The Treatment.

As we enter health reform’s final lap, critical details remain uncertain. Blue dogs and progressives must both be appeased. Critical financing issues must be resolved. House and Senate bills must be reconciled. Lots could still go wrong, but it seems likely that a 2,000 page behemoth will be thwonked onto the President’s desk. However President Obama manages the endgame to reach that point, he should roll that grand presidential desk onto Air Force One and fly it to Hope, Arkansas where he should sign that final bill.

Some of my fellow early Obama supporters may be appalled at my last sentence. You may remember the Democrats' tough nomination fight. I certainly do. I supported Barack Obama from the beginning because I was done with Bill Clinton after his lapses of personal integrity cost the nation so dearly. I was furious with both Clintons at various points in the 2008 campaign. Politics is a tough business. It could hardly be otherwise.

These disputes provide all the more reason to bring Democrats together for what promises to be a genuine historic achievement. Fifteen years ago, the Clintons took a big gamble that they could send a big package to Congress and get the thing passed. They lost, but their effort was more substantive, skillful, and worthy than is commonly remembered.

Slipping their way past the tight security at the Capitol Hilton, liberal activists from a group called “Billionaires for Wealthcare” interrupted AHIP pollster Bill McInturff as he took the stage for the closing speech of the insurance lobby’s conference this morning.

Congress's attempts to deal with the housing crisis this spring created surprising rifts within the financial industry, particularly between big banks and investors (at hedge funds and elsewhere). The two groups had started off united in their opposition--before the banks sold out their erstwhile allies and bargained for a better deal.

The first time I remember speaking with Karen Ignagni was via a TV satellite, for a debate about health care policy on CNN. It was the summer of 2007, not long after the debut of Michael Moore's Sicko, and each of us was playing our usual role. Ignagni is the telegenic president of America's Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) and arguably Washington's most influential health-industry lobbyist.

After several weeks of swooning, news reports are finally being filed about the gap between Senator Barack Obama’s promises of a pure, soul-cleansing “new” politics and the calculated, deeply dishonest conduct of his actually-existing campaign. But it remains to be seen whether the latest ploy by the Obama camp--over allegations about the circulation of a photograph of Obama in ceremonial Somali dress--will be exposed by the press as the manipulative illusion that it is.