joining me now is matt iglesias, a fellow at the certain terre for american progress. how significant is senate majority leader harry reid's statement on this? >> it's fairly significant. it shows that no one in the leadership, nor the white house or the senate, wants to rule out a public option. but of course, the question has been the centrist democratic senators. that was the problem the last time around with the public option. and it is still the problem today. you have 20 senators signing on to a letter but need at least 50. >> what was the count in terms of senators supporting a public option before it was traded away? how many votes did they think it could get before? >> well, this is what no one is quite clear on. there were two to four senators who took the fall for killing the public option. there's always been a suspicion among people who report on this, who cover it, that the broader number of democratic senators weren't thrilled with the idea. they were happy to have it be joe lieberman's fault. now the question is how many are there that want to take resp

matt iglesias joins rachel in washington. i find the flight i .great hotel my kids will love. yeah. but wait... here's the really cool part. when i book them at the same time... voila! i can save up to 450 bucks. and we all know that can come in pretty handy. book flight and hotel, and save more. where you book matters, expedia. ♪ dot com somewhere in america... there's a home by the sea powered by the wind on the plains. there's a hospital where technology has a healing touch. there's a factory giving old industries new life. and there's a train that got a whole city moving again. somewhere in america, the toughest questions are answered every day. because somewhere in america, more than sixty thousand people spend every day answering them. siemens. answers. >>> back to cpac. discussing the essence of the tiger woods apology, i felt entitled with jean robinson. what does that mean? there's no way these stories could ever overlap, could they you would be surprised in tonight's nightly comment. >>> governor pawlenty had been considered as a reasona

on dark thursday last week, my friend, matt iglesias, was on the hill and said he wanted to run aroundsarah connor shaking people saying you don't understand, you're already dead. everybody dies. [laughter] and that's the political logic. of passing health care reform. if they don't do it, everybody dies. all of them. they all go down. the base doesn't move. the base sees them as losers, which they are. the other side hates the bill. and i just want to note one thing. when health care was failing last week i surfed over to my friends at "time" magazine. and my friend, mike sheer, who's a very nice guy and even if -- wrote a piece about the five things barack obama did wrong on health care reform. and then i went over to news week and michael hirsch had written the five things barack obama did wrong in his first year. and one thing to know about the media, because my colleagues are very, very, very bad at their jobs, is you work backward from outcomes, right? oh, so we failed. all right. well, what contributed to failure? well, overreach, it was too liberal, whatever. you succeed. well,