The audio’s poor so I’m sending you to the Wash Times site, where you can follow along on the transcript, to watch. I have no problem with this in principle, incidentally; Bush ignored the opinions of most of his constituents in ordering the surge and it turned out to be the right move. If a pol’s supposed to robotically follow the polling on every issue then we might as well replace representatives with actual robots and institute direct democracy. And yet … on a subject as hot-button as this, after having won a 51/49 election last year, this guy’s clearly taking his electoral life in his hands by saying this out loud. But he’s exactly what The One needs to pass a public option and exactly what I had in mind in the last post when I talked about the White House peeling a few Blue Dogs away. Are there enough Democrats from purplish/reddish districts willing to risk their futures to pass the progressive utopian dream of universal health care? Massa says he’s willing to brave an 80/20 split among his constituents to get it done. How many other centrists are prepared to kamikaze for the cause?

Whatever the answer, this is going to make one hell of a Republican campaign commercial. Click the image to watch.