Meanwhile...

As Coakley is talking sense, the Big Dog himself urges the Senate to go ahead and pass the healthcare bill:

Former President Bill Clinton urged Senate Democrats on Tuesday to pass health care legislation by year's end, pointedly telling skittish lawmakers that an imperfect bill is preferable to another failure like the one he and the party endured in 1994.

"It's not important to be perfect here. It's important to act, to move, to start the ball rolling," the former president told reporters after the closed-door meeting, held on the cusp of Senate debate on intensely controversial legislation.

O rly? How's that work out with NAFTA? Still waiting for those human rights standards to be built back in. Or, as Shaker Amy emailed: "How'd that don't ask, don't tell shit work for everyone?" Yeah, that was a great "start," too. So was DOMA. It's obviously a GREAT idea to pass some half-assed bullshit with the intent of fixing it down the road, because those improvements always TOTALLY happen. There's absolutely no evidence AT ALL that passing some brokedown stopgap with the intention of not letting things get worse actually just creates another barrier to genuine progress that interminably delays the ultimate goal. Am I laying on the sarcasm thick enough for you, Bill?

Several Democrats who attended the meeting with Clinton said the former president did not express an opinion on many of the controversial issues embedded in the health care debate. These range from calls for a government-run insurance option to the availability of abortion coverage in private and government insurance.

"He wasn't asked that and he didn't volunteer to solve Sen. Reid's immediate problems," said Sen. Ben Cardin, D-Md.

Instead, several Democrats said, Clinton told them that expanding health care is good policy, and at the same time the best politics.

"He did address it, essentially to say, 'You're going to do it, and then people are going to begin to see that none of the bad things people are talking about will come to pass,'" said Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif.

*headdesk*