That’s the news catching on like wildfire this morning – that President Obama has dropped his support for a public option in the healthcare bill. Like most on our side I was at first really upset over this, but instead of starting my screams of anguish, I sat here and thought about it.

When you start looking into the story you quickly realize that there is mixed messages going on. Kathleen Sebelius was the one who brought us the news of no public option yesterday, but Robert Gibbs basically denied it. Is the Obama White House this confused on message, or is it part of a bigger plan?

Democrats are losing the message war during the August recess. Townhalls are turning into shouting matches thanks to the right wing opponents of health care reform, and now the two big things they have complained about, a public option and end of life counseling, are rumored to be gone. That takes away their two biggest complaints, while the loss of these items should ignite our base.

Perhaps this is a way for the administration to regain control of the message war in August. We are at the halfway point of the recess, and now the White House can see what happens at the townhalls with these two items off the table. If they start seeing outrage from the left about it then they can come back in September and reinstate the options, citing a public outrage over the removal of them.

On top of that, if there is visible outrage from the President’s own party, that will be much more meaningful than opposition from a bunch of McCain/Palin supporters. That will also help to push the Blue Dogs over to our side that much more. After all once the recess is over they need to start their campaigns for the 2010 elections.

So my thought is that the Democrats should get highly outraged. Take a lesson from the teabaggers and start yelling and screaming at these townhalls. Tell the elected representative holding them that if they want to ignore the will of the polls from last November then we will work to make sure the polls ignore them in November 2010.

This is a must to regain message control. Once the Democrats regain control of the message then they can reinstate everything next month that was lost this month. Just remember – we don’t even have a bill yet. It’s still dynamic and we can still have it changed. Democrats just need to make sure they don’t follow their old instinct of giving up. Right now we have been given the chance to really fight, and we must do so. If not then we can’t really blame Obama for the failure to get real reform – we can only blame ourselves.