I see that the Obama administration is expected to offer up a compromise on contraceptive coverage later this morning. Greg Sargent wisely tweets, “I see no reason not to wait for final proposal. The world won’t be worse off if we yell ‘cave’ in an hour, instead of right now.”
Fine. I’ll wait. Politically, though, it sounds like a disaster no matter what the compromise is. All the folks who have had Obama’s back on this are going to be wildly furious, and the Catholic bishops, having smelled blood already, will not be appeased. Not even slightly. They won’t accept any compromise other than an absolute, ironclad exemption for any institution that’s associated in any way with the church, putting a clear end to all the nonsense about this really being an issue of copays or some other secondary issue.
This has not been well played.