We don’t know for sure that Obama is about to give up on the public option. I think, in the end, he will not. I think he may be tougher than some think and stronger than the polls show. But I admit there are troubling signs.

“The public option, whether we have it or we don’t have it, is not the entirety of health care reform,” Obama said at Grand Junction. “This is just one sliver of it, one aspect of it.”

But it is a very important sliver, a critical aspect. And how Obama acts right now on health care reform could tell us how he will act for the rest of his presidency.

Sometimes it is not enough to have just your heart and your head in the right place. You have to have your guts there, too.