President Obama’s health care reform strategy at the moment makes sense, even though nobody should be sure how it will work out.

Let's begin with the substance. His current proposal is a plausible compromise between the Senate and House bills. People should disagree about the bill if they disagree with the values it seeks to serve; but most of the conservative attacks on it are fact-free.

The goal of the bills is to preserve the insurance most Americans have now, but fill in the gaps. The major effect would be to fix the horribly broken and inefficient market for individual and small-group insurance. It would make adequate insurance far more affordable for most people in those markets, particularly helping small businesses and their employees.

I am among those who conclude the compromise will not do as much as we’d like to help large employers and their employees control costs. I have argued that the administration’s economists overstate possible savings from the boatload of cost control initiatives in the plan. But that is a different question from whether the bill will pay for itself. The Congressional Budget Office has been properly conservative in estimating savings, and if CBO scores the bill as paying for itself, it is highly likely to do so.

The main effect of the bill on most Americans will be to give them a safety net: a decent backup in case they lose their jobs or their employers slash benefits. It will guarantee decent insurance for tens of millions of other citizens. It is not a threat to what people have now, is not a budget buster, and it is structured in ways that would have looked conservative in the 1970s. It is in no way a "government takeover" of health care.

Next, consider the legislative situation. The short term is very simple. Republicans are against anything that would insure more than a few million people, and have no incentive to agree with the Democrats even on that. They will filibuster anything they can. Therefore the advocates of health care reform have only one option. They have to pass the Senate bill in the House, and then pass a reconciliation "fix" in order to compromise between the two bills. This is by no means standard procedure, but the Republican criticisms are hypocritical in the extreme. Their routine use of the filibuster on hundreds of occasions is also not standard procedure. Moreover, as many people have pointed out, the Republicans used reconciliation for many major laws, some of which made the budget situation much worse.

The two-stage process of enacting the Senate bill and an accompanying reconciliation limits the set of changes that can be made. The Byrd Rule precedents about extraneous matter might, for example, prohibit strengthening of the new insurance exchanges that are supposed to improve the individual and small-group markets. Nevertheless, this tactic is the only way to pass anything serious this year. Since this reconciliation is based on the fiscal year 2010 budget process, it also only makes sense to do it before the next budget resolution is passed. So both the tactic and moving quickly are the only plausible options.

There is another dimension of the legislative situation that may be obvious but bears repeating. The long-term is as simple as the short-term. The Democrats will lose seats in November. The in-party almost always loses seats in the midterms, and that is especially likely if it had a big gain in the presidential election. Redistricting after 2010 is unlikely to add seats to Democratic-leaning parts of the country. Anything the Democrats do to improve the long-term budget situation will hurt them further (see: Bush, George H. W. in 1990; Clinton, William J. in 1993). Obama could be a one-term president and the Democrats are highly unlikely to see majorities as large as they have now any time in the next decade. It took 15 years to get major health insurance reform back on the legislative agenda after the defeat in 1994, and it could be as long before it comes up again if it fails this time.

On the other hand, if the current legislation passes, it becomes the status quo. A Republican government will try to repeal major provisions before they go into effect in 2014. Advocates of reform would have much preferred a plan that would go into effect sooner. Yet it is always better, in this political system, to be playing defense, trying to prevent changes in existing law. There is no guarantee that any law which is passed now will go into effect as planned. Yet it is far better to pass a law and then play defense, than to fail now and wait another decade or more. There is also a reasonable chance that passing the bills now will improve the Democrats’ political prospects.

The political question is how the current course compares to alternatives. According to some remarkably wishful (when from editorial writers or centrists) or insincere (if from most Republican politicians) rhetoric, the president should "start over" on a "bipartisan" basis. The substantive gaps between the two parties on this issue are as wide as we have ever seen in American politics. Anyone who believes differently has not followed the debate. In order to see any prospect for bipartisanship you also have to believe that the Republicans have incentives or desire to agree on anything. There is no evidence that they do, short of total concession by the Democrats. I suppose a majority of Republicans might be found for blowing up the current insurance system and replacing it with a mix of tax credits and preferential treatment for health savings accounts, while privatizing Medicare and limiting Medicaid. But Democrats should be running against that, not supporting it.

The real choice for the Democrats is between stopping the effort and doing what Obama is doing. The argument for stopping says that the legislation is unpopular, that the Democrats have been digging themselves into a hole by pushing the effort, and that actually passing it would be equivalent to digging deeper and then ordering a backhoe to shovel the dirt on top of them. Some of the polling data can be used to support this analysis. It is clear that charges about a "government takeover," "ignoring the majority" and budget deficits resonates with much of the public.

Supporters of the president’s course reply that the Democrats have already been identified with the effort to pass a major reform. The portion of the public that strongly opposes the effort will still vote against Democrats just to make sure they don’t try it again. Hence the question is whether, once identified with the initiative, it is better to win or lose. Giving up now will not change the identification, but will add the stigma of being ineffectual losers. This will not help with centrists, will not reduce the anger of conservatives, but will depress the party base, likely reducing turnout for the Democrats in November. From this view, passing the two bills now is the best political strategy.

The Democrats do face a nasty choice, with major risks on either side. Yet neither view is convincing. I’m teaching introductory American politics at the moment, and it seems to me that each view ignores something that we try to make sure our students understand.

First, on most issues, there is no such thing as a stable "public opinion." People do have general attitudes, beliefs that they can use to evaluate a choice. But often voters hold different attitudes that would lead to different evaluations of the same choice. How they answer a question depends on which considerations have been raised in their minds most recently.

Therefore the analysts who predict Democratic defeats in November based on negative survey responses about health care reform now are making a fundamental error. The Republicans have shown great ability to raise considerations that push the evaluation in one direction. Yet some of that effort has been encouraged by the concerns conservative Democrats raised during the debate as they tried to make legislation better fit their preferences. They will not be making those arguments as they run for reelection. In the election campaign there would be far more spending on ads to defend the legislation. The press coverage may focus more on the actual provisions of the bill as opposed to the GOP charges. But focusing on the actual specifics will only be possible if there is a law that passed and can be defended. Democrats have to be able to point to something and say: "this is what we did, this is the truth about it, this is how it would help you." The Democrats also have to remember that the "losers who can’t deliver" consideration will be far more prominent in November if they pass nothing now. In short, the battle over interpretation of the health care reform effort has only begun. We do not know how it will turn out in November, but there are good reasons to believe the Democrats are better off fighting it with a new law in hand.

Therefore if the question were only "what’s the right strategy in general," introductory American politics tells us that the question is how to get the best set of considerations before the voters in the fall; and that favors passing the bills now. But that brings us to the second basic point: elections occur in individual districts. Sometimes there are national trends, and there should be one against the Democrats this year, no matter what they do. Yet districts and states vary greatly, and each member of Congress casts votes based on how he or she assesses their constituency, not the national trend.

This means that the political question is not how passing the bills would shape general public attitudes. It is how voting for the bills some time in the next month or so will affect the reelection prospects of perhaps 30-40 representatives and maybe 10 senators. The general factors I have identified may suggest that they are better off voting for the bills now, especially if they voted for the previous House or Senate bill. But their choices must depend on specific provisions of the final legislation (such as whether abortion is a problem in their district, in either direction); how much they have to worry about depressing the base in their district (such as whether the base is more or less liberal); the strength of their likely opponent; and many other factors.

So, is the president’s endgame strategy the right one? It is right on the substance (if you share my values) and right in terms of the legislative situation (even if you do not share my values). Whether it is good politics is impossible to say. All things considered, as a strategy to address public opinion concerns, passing the bills makes more sense than not. It likely is the best approach for the Democratic party’s image nationwide, and for the president’s.

But whether that strategy will work, in terms of passing the bills and limiting losses in November, simply cannot be known right now. Each of those depends on how the strategy works out, or is judged by legislators to work out, district by district and state by state.

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Joseph White is Director of the Center for Policy Studies at Case Western Reserve University.