John Diamond, the communications director for Sen. Maria Cantwell, called me this afternoon to say, essentially, that people should put down their Cantwell-related picket signs. “She has been consistently advocating the public option all along," Diamond said. “She has said, very flatly and very clearly, that she’s for a public option. I just don’t see how she could be any clearer in stating her support.”

I would beg to differ. The record (here, here, here, and here) shows Cantwell promoting the "co-op compromise" over the public option in late June—because, she said at the time, the public option didn't have enough votes in the Senate—and then backtracking ever since.

But Diamond wasn't calling just to say that Cantwell has always been clear. He was also calling because yesterday a source leaked me an e-mail that appears to show a recent behind-the-scenes example of Cantwell backtracking—stating that she's moving from support for co-ops to exclusive support for the public option. The e-mail describes a phone conversation Cantwell had yesterday with Rick Bender, president of the Washington State Labor Council, after Bender sent Cantwell a three-page letter (.pdf) that attempted to move Cantwell away from the co-op idea:

From: Jeff Johnson
Sent: Tuesday, July 14, 2009 1:28 PM
To: [Multiple recipients]
Subject: RE: Letter from Rick Bender regarding recent meeting with
Senator Cantwell

FYI - Maria called this morning. She very much appreciated the letter and said that it would be helpful. She also said that she is off the co-op idea and will support a real public option.

Congratulations to us all.

Jeff

Jeff Johnson is Rick Bender's special assistant, so presumably he would know what was said in that phone conversation. It's also worth noting that if Bender was concerned enough about Cantwell's position on co-ops to write her that three-page letter on Monday—after, as the letter notes, Bender met personally with Cantwell to talk about health care reform on June 30—then Cantwell's position could not have been as crystal clear as Diamond contends.

I asked Diamond: Did the conversation between Cantwell and Bender in fact happen as described in the e-mail?

“They did have a conversation," Diamond told me. "We don’t go into what goes on in these conversations, and I wasn’t sitting in on it anyway, but from our understanding at our end, the issue of co-ops never even came up."

Interesting. (I'm still waiting for the Labor Council's official account of the conversation.) But leaving all of that aside for a moment, and moving to a more immediate question:

Will Cantwell clear up any lingering confusion about her stance by promising to vote against any co-op proposal that comes through the influential Senate Finance Committee, on which she sits? (A committee that, as of today, is now the only relevant committee that hasn't put forward a health care reform plan.)

“I’m just not, as a matter of policy, going to engage in telling you what she’s going to do about a bill that doesn’t exist yet," Diamond said.

It doesn't formally exist, perhaps, but the ideas that would be in it have been widely discussed. So, does Cantwell support the co-op compromise as it's previously been talked about by herself and her committee's leadership?

“There is no co-op compromise," Diamond said. "There’s nothing on the table as far as I know. I don’t know what others are discussing but that’s not where she’s at. She’s not going to meetings discussing the co-op option, I can tell you that.”

We'll have to wait and see the proposed bill that comes out of Finance, and where Cantwell lands when that happens, but for now that's the closest I've heard to a public statement from Cantwell's office disowning her previous support for co-ops.

Photo by Kelly O