A friend asked over the weekend how I'm feeling about Obama. Well, nervous, but still strongly in support. I wish the fate of his presidency didn't seem to be riding on what Congress does with health-care reform this week, though.

I sympathize a bit with the Democrats who are still wavering; this is complicated stuff. But I'm still convinced that the House ought to pass the Senate bill, blemishes and all. It's a start. And if this attempt fails, I can't imagine that any president in the next couple of decades will have the courage to try again. So we'll be stuck with escalating costs and a growing number of uninsured.

I also think that A) if the bill passes, the furor will die down, and Americans will like what they see in the bill, and B) the Democrats (and surely, surely, a few reasonable Republicans) will act on other important things, burying the charge that they can't get anything done.

That said, I found two pieces in today's New York Times particularly challenging and informative: David Brooks' "The Spirit of Sympathy" and "The Health Care Letdown," by William Pewen, a former health-policy advisor for Maine's Senator Olympia Snowe.

Brooks bemoans the bitterness and partisanship that has developed in the Senate, where across-the-aisle, interpersonal relationships once were common. And he warns against passing bills by reconciliation, which Democrats may attempt with health care. "Once partisan reconciliation is used for this bill," Brooks writes, "it will be used for everything, now and forever." And in the Senate, he writes, "the remnants of person-to-person relationships, with their sympathy and sentiment, will be snuffed out."

Pewen shines some light on the attempts at bipartisanship in the health-care deliberations, and he finds fault with both Republicans and Democrats. For instance: "many Republicans had decided even before Inauguration Day to block reform," he writes, "including policies that their party had previously supported." And rather than tackle legitimate concerns like how much Americans would have to pay for insurance under a mandated plan, "the Democratic leadership, in the interest of political expediency, expanded the scope of the legislation, adding more regulation, spending, and taxes. Soon health care reform, which had been achievable, became endangered."

And, he writes, while Democrats first insisted on having a public option as part of reform, they later abandoned it, even though Snowe, a Republican, had herself offered public option as a fallback.

He chastises Democrats for killing a bipartisan proposal that would have permitted the importing of prescription drugs. Democrats had already nixed that important progressive step by cutting a deal with the pharmaceutical industry.

And he throws out a challenge to Republicans that I guess we can take some comfort in: If reform fails now, "Republicans should take no consolation," he writes. Whenever the country gets around to passing reform, "health costs and the number of uninsured and underinsured will have escalated - and the likely outcome will be the single-payer system that Republicans most abhor."

Both worth a read.