Do Democrats Have Enough Health Care Votes?

WASHINGTON (March 16) -- Do Democrats have the votes? That's the only question that matters in Washington this week as Democrats make a final push to enact health care reform.

From President Barack Obama to the top vote-counters in the House, party leaders are facing the query wherever they go. And their responses have been dissected down to the tense of the verb they use.

The stark reality: By the time lawmakers head to the House floor, perhaps at the end of this week, 216 of them will need to vote "yes" in order to make the health care bill the law of the land. And far fewer than 216 have publicly announced their intention to cast that vote in favor.

These are the primary lines of thinking:

The Hopeful Hedge: If Wishing Made It So

Most Democratic leaders have taken the tack of projecting confidence in the final outcome of the climactic vote while implicitly acknowledging that the arm-twisting isn't quite done.

"I believe we are going to get the votes, we're going to make this happen," Obama told ABC News on Monday, when correspondent Jake Tapper put the question to him directly.

The future tense was also popular with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. "When we bring the bill to the floor, we will have the votes," she told reporters Monday, repeating the optimistic mantra she adopted late last week. It marked an ever-so-slight departure from her comments a week ago in an interview with Charlie Rose, when she said that Democrats would have the votes "if we took it up today."

A top Pelosi ally, Education Committee Chairman Rep. George Miller put it yet another way on Wednesday: "We can see the votes from here."

We Have the Votes. Now. (Maybe)

Rep. John Larson, D-Conn., chairman of the Democratic caucus, has made the most declarative statement of any party leader in recent days. "I believe we have the votes and that we will get this bill done this week," he said on Monday, The Hill reported. He added: "I think that the votes are there." But before the alarm bells could be sounded, The Daily Caller reported that an aide to Larson clarified that, in the reporter's words, his comment was "more of a prediction than a statement of actual conditions."

The Big Admission: 'We Don't Have Them'

The No. 3 House Democrat, Rep. James Clyburn, S.C., provided the most pessimistic status update on Sunday, acknowledging what Obama, Pelosi and others have avoided: "No, we don't have them as of this morning," Clyburn told NBC's Tom Brokaw on "Meet the Press." He did voice confidence that Democrats would be able to pass the bill, but his admission that they had some more persuading to do was the bottom-line statement that made headlines nationwide.

The parsing will surely continue for another few days, but the reality for Democrats and vote-counters is that they likely won't know for sure until the final votes are recorded on the House floor. When lawmakers voted for the health care bill initially in November, the ultimate breakdown -- 220-215 in favor -- remained a mystery until the end. And it included a few surprises, most notably the "yes" vote of Rep. Anh "Joseph" Cao, who gave a last-minute droplet of Republican support to a measure that was expected to break strictly along party lines.

And Democrats can look further back in history as well. In 1993, Rep. Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky provided the decisive vote in support of President Bill Clinton's hotly debated budget only after the president called her while the vote was taking place. She recalled to the Daily Beast that she had gone to the Capitol intending to vote against the bill. After she voted for it, she was defeated for re-election that fall.