The Huffington Post recently posted an utterly fantastic and incredibly illuminating look at the intra-party fighting, both within the Democratic Party as a whole and the Progressive Caucus in particular. It’s fairly long but incredibly compelling, and kept me up way past bedtime last night.

There’s enough material in there to write a dozen blog posts, and I intend to get into deeper detail on it later, but first there’s one blackly humorous note that I think deserves some attention. Over the course of the health care debate we often saw a lot of Obama supporters claiming that, contrary to any available evidence, the President deeply supported the Public Option. There were just… obstacles.. in the way to prevent him from, you know, actually supporting it. It might be Baucus, it might be Reid, it might be Lieberman or the House, but it was always something. Something that forced the sacrifice.

Of course, we know that not to be the case. Obama not only didn’t push for the Public Option, he actively campaigned against it, then traded it away in secret to the big for-profit hospitals.

Still, the depth of contempt the White House had, for this already heavily compromised bit of liberalism and its supporters, wasn’t in evidence until now:

Take the case of Reps. Jared Polis (D-Colo.) and Chellie Pingree (D-Maine). This past January, the health care reform effort was collapsing amidst the rubble of the Senate special election in Massachusetts and Obama was talking publicly about paring reform down to a few essential pieces. Polis had a different idea. In a meeting that Pelosi held for Democratic rookies the week after Scott Brown’s surprise victory, he suggested reviving the public option. The Senate had lost its 60-vote supermajority and was in the process of considering the use of the reconciliation procedure, which would require only 50 votes and eliminate the need to placate public option opponents such as Sen. Joe Lieberman.

…

As the number of senators joining the effort expanded, it generated leadership support, with Democratic Sens. Charles Schumer (N.Y.) and Bob Menendez (N.J.) getting behind it. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) was the next to jump on board.

…

It gave new life to the effort and cemented the policy as a key legislative priority in the future.

“It helped a whole lot,” says Rep. James Clyburn (D-S.C.), the man in charge of whipping votes, of the Pingree-Polis letter. “The base getting fired up helped a whole lot. We could feel it out there.” Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), reflecting on the letter, agrees. “It added energy to the effort to get to where we wanted to get,” he says in an interview in his office the week the House passed the final piece of reform.

The White House didn’t appreciate the new energy. A few hours after Reid’s office put out a statement in support of the public option, Rahm Emanuel met senior Reid aide Jim Manley and a few reporters from the Washington Post and the New York Times for dinner and drinks at Lola’s, a Capitol Hill bar and grill. Seeing Manley, Emanuel offered a response to Reid’s gesture with one of his own: a double-bird, an eerie sight given his half-severed right finger.

I’m beginning to think Rahm enjoys hippie punching as more of a fetish than a hobby.