For me, the biggest mistake the Democrats made on health care was not being ready to pass the bill once Paul Kirk was seated as the replacement for Teddy Kennedy on September 24th, 2009. Naturally, it was assumed that a Democrat would be elected to replace Kirk, but you never know when a senator might fall ill. Robert Byrd is in frail health. Frank Lautenberg was just diagnosed with stomach cancer. When your strategy depends on getting 60 votes and you only have 60 members, you should act with dispatch and not dither around. There was a lot of fuss in August, at the height of the tea parties and rowdy town hall meetings, about the Democrats negotiating with President Snowe. But, at the time, the Democrats needed her vote because Kirk had not been appointed yet. In fact, the dependence on a 60-vote strategy made passage so precarious that it made perfect sense to pursue Snowe’s vote even if it meant that the bill had to be watered down.

It’s easy to go back in retrospect and argue that the Democrats should have known that the Republicans would be united in opposition to health care reform, and that they would use every obstructive tactic in the Senate rulebook to slow down and derail the effort. But, the Republicans’ behavior truly is unprecedented. And Obama did run on changing the tone in Washington and getting the two parties to work together. He would have paid a political price if he hadn’t made a visible effort to engage the Republicans.

The mistake was made when the Democrats abandoned the threat of using reconciliation if the Republicans wouldn’t act in good faith. The exact threat that is being made now should have been made no later than July. When Max Baucus was negotiating with Grassley, Enzi, and Snowe, he should have been aided by a White House and Senate leadership who were threatening to take the whole bill away and cram it through at the 50-vote threshold.

Why didn’t that happen back in July? Mainly because of individual Democratic senators’ resistance to the idea. Some opposed it on parliamentary grounds, others because it would reduce their influence, and still others because they wanted some bipartisan cover for enacting a major new federal program. In other words, the White House did not have sufficient support in their own caucus for playing the kind of hardball that would have made reconciliation a credible threat. Yet, here we are. We’re actually in a better position than I even anticipated because the bulk of the legislation has already passed through the Senate. We have many fewer parliamentary hurdles to pass in reconciliation than we would have had if the whole bill had had to be crafted that way.

Now, the way I see it, if one or more Republicans can be shamed into granting a cloture vote, the plan the president laid out is a decent outcome. But if the Republicans remain united in opposition after the Health Care Summit, the Democrats should pass a bill that is closer to what Obama proposed in the first place. Why not? Pass what you promised. You’re going to get criticized for passing health care reform regardless of what is in it. So pass the bill you really want. And, yes, that included a public option. You campaigned on it and the people elected you. It remains the single most popular element of the reforms. If a couple of moderates can’t stomach it, so what?

But, ultimately, it is up to the senators to decide. Either we have 50 votes for it or we don’t.