Shortly after Senate Democrats on Saturday night succeeded in winning a party-line 60-39 vote that allows their health care reform bill to reach the Senate floor, CNN correspondent Ed Henry zapped out a message to his Twitter followers about a White House statement that hailed this development: "interesting [press secretary Robert] Gibbs does NOT mention Obama's end-of-year deadline. Is that loosening? (they may calculate Jan or Feb better than no bill)." I then Twitter-replied to Henry, "Of course, Jan or Feb is better than no bill, right? Why get hung up on 12/31/09? Worried about #2012?" (I was jokingly referring to the end-of-the-world disaster movie.) My point -- perhaps not fully conveyed in less-than-140 characters -- was that this is hard stuff, and no one ought to fixate on whether or not a bill that will reshape a huge part of the U.S. economy is signed, sealed and delivered before a specific date. Henry tweeted back: "True but how many times are Dems going to defy President on deadlines?"

Deadlines? Who needs stinkin' deadlines? For months, I've been critical of aspects of the Obama White House approach to health care reform. I thought it was a mistake for President Obama, when his approval rating was near 60 percent, to hand off his top-priority domestic initiative to Congress, an outfit with approval ratings near 30 percent. I also thought that the president erred early on by not defining the legislation strongly as a pro-consumer measure (no more denial of coverage due to pre-existing conditions and so on), thus rendering it easier for the bill to be defined by the subsequent tussles over the public option and abortion. But as with Obama's ongoing Afghanistan review, this health care stuff is difficult -- especially when moneyed interests, such as the insurance companies, have powerful disincentives to obstruct -- and the White House ought not be timed as it navigates this obstacle course.

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Look at what happened the morning after. On the Sunday talking head shows, two of the leading Senate players who voted to allow debate to proceed took diametrically opposed positions on a crucial issue. Joe Lieberman, the cantankerous ex-Democrat who still caucuses with the D's, proclaimed on "Meet the Press" that if the public option remains in the bill it will be filibustered to death by him and the Republicans. Yet on "Face the Nation," Chuck Schumer declared that the measure, with its current "modest" public option, will win out in the Senate. Both men can't be right.

There are plenty of bombs for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to defuse -- if he's going to maintain this 60-vote majority. Imagine keeping both Schumer and Lieberman aboard, not to mention 58 other upper chamber lawmakers, many with super-sized egos. We've not heard the last of The Three Amigos -- Blanche Lincoln, Mary Landrieu and Ben Nelson. (Reid reportedly won Landrieu's vote for this round by handing her $100 million in addition federal funds for her home state, a move dubbed the "the Louisiana Purchase" by congressional staffers.)

Meanwhile, Sen. Bernie Sanders, the independent from Vermont who calls himself a democratic socialist, issued a statement on Sunday saying that he would not support final passage of the bill without a "strong" public option. (He was one of those 60 votes on Saturday night.) Is it possible that at the end of the day, one of the two independents in the Senate -- Lieberman or Sanders -- will scuttle the bill? Should Sanders' threat be taken any less seriously than Lieberman's?

On the House side, there are dozens of liberal Democratic legislators who remain enraged that the version of the bill their body passed contained the Stupak Amendment, which would expand restrictions on abortion. They can make life tough for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who will have to negotiate a compromise with the Senate (presuming the Senate passes a bill) and then sell that compromise to her fellow Democrats. (And anti-abortion groups and lawmakers are grousing that the Senate bill is not nearly as tough on abortion as the Stupak Amendment.) By the way, there are only 31 shopping days to Christmas -- and much fewer legislating days, with Congress taking off this week for Thanksgiving.

The necessary cajoling and wheeling-and-dealing -- between Reid and the members of his not-so-firm 60-vote bloc; between the Senate and the House; between Pelosi and her fellow House Democrats -- will take plenty of time. And it's unclear how much Obama can and will lean on iffy Democrats and independents. (Reid and Obama are also fervently courting Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe, the two moderate Republican senators from Maine, neither of whom voted for the bill on Saturday night.) Patience is advised.

At this point, the White House spin is accurate. In that statement released Saturday night, Gibbs said that this "historic vote brings us one step closer." In fact, major health reform has never been closer -- not since Medicare and Medicaid were created in 1965. Certainly, the bill could founder. And it is far from perfect. (Big Pharma makes out like a bandit; the public option, if it survives, is likely not to be sufficient; cost-savings are far from certain.) But credit Obama for getting this far, over the often reality-defying objections of Republicans in Washington and corporate-interest foes, such as the insurance industry and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. He and his Democratic colleagues on Capitol Hill have done so in part by kicking various cans -- the public option, the abortion issue -- down the road. Yet these cans aren't going away. Final decisions have to be made. Still, after all the heavy lifting done to date, Obama and the Dems need not rush to wrap this up. It's true that 2010 is an election year, but there's no immediate expiration date on this legislative medicine.

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