Rep. Cooper has apparently become the go-to Blue Dog for the New York Times for "centrist" quotes on health care. Sometimes he feeds them lines that are deceitfully self-serving ("the lobbyists are winning!"), but most of the time they end up being simply self-revealing.

Case in point: today's front-page New York Times piece on the "next big hurdle" for the health care debate, the public option. As Scarecrow notes, to characterize a robust public option as an "obstacle" causing "deep divisions" within the Democratic party is simply inaccurate:

Only a small handful of Congressional Democrats (who in another era, would have been Republicans) oppose a public plan. This near consensus reflects that 65 percent of Americans and overwhelming majorities of Democratic voters support the idea, as shown in the most recent New York Times/CBS poll.

More specifically, there is broad Democratic support in the House for a robust public option that would be tied to Medicare rates, and an even broader consensus that some public option is needed:

Over two hundred Democrats in the House are prepared to vote for a public plan tied to Medicare rates while most of the rest would accept a public plan with negotiated rates. In the Senate, there are likely over 50 votes for a public plan and a majority of Democrats, not including all of its supporters, have already sent Harry Reid a letter asking him to include a public option in the merged bill. The Times can’t recall any of this.

But guess who the New York Times names as the reasonable "centrist" who opposes a robust public plan that would provide real competition for private for-profit insurance companies?

But centrists like Representative Jim Cooper, Democrat of Tennessee, who teaches health policy at Vanderbilt University, call the Medicare plan unworkable. Mr. Cooper said Medicare reimburses at such low rates that few doctors would sign on for such a plan.

I guess that strikes down one of those "eighteen definitions" of the public option Jim Cooper had in mind.