But the public option fight—however it turns out—could also help progressives in other ways. Whether out of pique, politics, or principle, Lieberman, Lincoln, and Nelson (and maybe one or two others) want to scream about something—and to have a concession they can claim as their own. If they end up demanding the public option as the price of their support—and I’m not saying I want that to happen—perhaps the rest of the bill can go through relatively unscathed. Or, to put it more starkly, if they didn’t have the public option to attack then it’d be the subsidies, or the price tag, or the insurance regulations. Merely by including the public option in his bill, Reid has increased the chances that the final bill is a good one—even if the public option is gone by the time deliberations are done.