I, too, have been irritated with the growing currency of the derisive term 11-Dimensional Chess. The term is used to dismiss the possibility that there is a rhyme and reason behind Obama’s strategies (particularly on health care). My short answer to this critique is that the health care bill is multi-dimensional and any strategy would have to reflect that. Start with the fact that the health care bill has to pass through three House and two Senate committees, all with their own unique membership and temperaments. That’s five dimensions. Then, consider that the three House bills have to be condensed into one House bill and the two Senate bills have to be condensed into one Senate bill. That’s seven dimensions. After that, each bill has to pass through its respective house of Congress. That’s nine dimensions. Then those two bills have to be melded into one bill and sent back to pass each house of Congress again. That’s eleven dimensions (or, maybe, twelve dimensions).

Even looking at the stages is a vast oversimplification. The administration has to work with the stakeholders, keeping them as much as possible on board with the reform effort. They have to communicate with the public and win the battle of public opinion. That means they have to have a media strategy. Just working through the process makes a game of 11-Dimensional Chess look like child’s play.

I know that most people using the term mean something slightly different. They mean that they are skeptical that Obama is really going to get a bill with a public option when he isn’t out there insisting that one be included in the bill. People don’t see how a weak negotiating stance can be rescued by some last minute jujitsu. I share that skepticism. But I also know that Maimonides is onto something when he/she writes:

For several months now I’ve been pushing the idea that President Obama is engaged in the Sun Tsu strategy of “formlessness.” This strategy is not the much-derided “11-D Chess” that so many choose to dismiss. This is the very simple and time-tested strategy of not taking a position that is easily defined by your opponents, of not giving them anything to attack. By doing so, one forces one’s opponents to take positions, giving you the advantage of adaptability and information, which they now lack.

This strategy was chosen specifically in response to the experiences of the Clinton Administration. (You may have heard of them, and you may have read that both former President Bill Clinton and SOS Hillary Clinton have advised President Obama on their experiences.) They proposed a well-defined health care bill, and then the Congress–and by that I mean both parties in Congress–proceeded to tear it to shreds and left the Clinton Administration with a smoking pit of regret and some very angry progressives instead of a bill signed into law.

Go back and think about those tea-parties in August. They did put a fleeting dent in public support for the public option. But they did no lasting damage for a couple of reasons, both related to ‘formlessness.’ First, there was a lack of specificity in what they were attacking because there were multiple bills and the Senate Finance Committee was talking about doing something completely different. This made it very hard to pick apart the legislation and argue persuasively about its faults. And, second, because of this, the tea-parties and the town-hall meeting screamers were forced to resort to unsubstantiated fear-mongering and conspiracy theories to score their points. It all made an impression, but it was a largely unfavorable one with no resonance.

The difference between this situation and what happened to Clinton’s effort is striking. The first thing the administration did is bring the doctors, nurses, insurance companies, and pharmaceutical companies into the process to prevent them from lobbying against the legislation. We may hate this decision, but we’d be dead in the water without it.

The second thing they did was to pursue Republican support despite the nearly sure-knowledge that none would be forthcoming. They did this long after that suspicion was confirmed, leading to delays and a howling-mad left-wing that assumed they were giving away the store for less than a song. But, look at these results from the NYT/CBS opinion poll:

Setting up those poll numbers was a prerequisite to any effort to use the budget reconciliation process. The public needed to be primed on the idea that the Republicans had rejected all reasonable compromise. This process was actually made easier by the fact that there was almost no risk that the Republicans would strike a deal for something less ambitious than what the president wants. Their total rejectionism actually worked against them.

It looks like the House is going to go ahead and pass the public option, despite all the times it has been pronounced dead by Republicans, the media, and even several Democrats. The Senate may or may not pass something, but it probably will not have the public option. Where it goes from there is anyone’s guess, but the groundwork has been laid to blame the Republicans if the budget reconciliation process is needed to pass the bill. Cover has been created to pass the bill through the Senate on a strictly party-line vote.

The only remaining obstacle is to get the Democratic Senate Caucus to vote for cloture.