The health care debate appears to be so intoxicating that even ninth-graders want to discuss the hows and whys of expanding coverage.

During a 20-minute question and answer period with 32 students on Tuesday before his national back to school address at Wakefield High School in Arlington, Va., President Obama took a query from a student who identified himself as Sean.

Why, Sean asked from what appeared to be a prepared question, does the United States lack universal health care when 36 other countries have such a system?

The message has been sent: President Obama is deliberately not ruling out a Democrats-only strategy to break the deadlock on health care.

At an online “strategy session” this afternoon sponsored by Organizing for America — formerly the grass-roots mobilization arm of his presidential campaign — Obama promised to move ahead on a health care overhaul “one way or another,” regardless of whether the Senate Finance Committee can reach an agreement that can win the support of three Senate Republicans.

Responding to a question about whether the bipartisan talks are doing any good, Obama said he wants “a good product that includes some Republican ideas.” But, he added, “I have no control over what the other side decides is its political strategy. My commitment to the American people is, we’re going to get this done one way or another.”

Liberal Democrats and progressive groups have been increasingly frustrated at how far the Obama administration, and particularly Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus of Montana, have been going to win Republican support — especially if the effort means getting rid of a proposed government-run health plan to compete with private insurers. They’ve noted that even Sen. Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, one of the three Republicans Baucus has been negotiating with, has said he might not support a deal if it can’t get substantial GOP support — a remark that has convinced them the Republicans aren’t negotiating in good faith.

By all accounts, President Obama didn’t use yesterday’s White House meeting with Senate Democrats to pressure Finance Chairman Max Baucus of Montana to hurry up and finish his health care bill. And the second-ranking Democrat on the committee, John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, said this afternoon that he doesn’t think Baucus will ultimately win the votes of the three Republicans he’s negotiating with.

But Rockefeller said Obama “very skillfully handled” a discussion of the most likely scenario: that sometime in September, Baucus will have to give up and the Democrats will have to try to pass the health care bill by using budget reconciliation procedures, which only require a 51-vote majority.

At a press conference on the health care bill, Rockefeller — who is not part of the negotiations on a bipartisan bill, even though he chairs the health care subcommittee — made it clear he doesn’t think Baucus will get anything except a weaker health care bill. “You just watch as the bill diminishes in its scope and its coverage and its ferocity to try to attack the problem,” Rockefeller said of Baucus’s talks with Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, Olympia J. Snowe of Maine, and Michael B. Enzi of Wyoming.

If you’re a Republican, reacting to today’s jobs report is the easiest task in the world. The economy lost 467,000 jobs in June, far more than expected — which means Republicans now have a strong reason to ask what we’re getting out of the $787 billion stimulus package.

“Spending, taxing, and borrowing with reckless abandon is no way to create more jobs,” House Minority Leader John A. Boehner of Ohio said in a statement this morning. Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele said the numbers prove that “the stimulus package is not a ‘Recovery Act.’ ” Boehner even released a video featuring bloodhounds trying to find any jobs created by the stimulus. (Get it?)

But what do you do if you’re a Democrat? Your spin job is a lot harder. Finally, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California showed her party how it’s done. You sympathize with those who lost their jobs but say it would have been worse without the stimulus. And — still — you blame George W. Bush.

Though Republicans still love to portray him as an urban elite, President Obama managed to more or less split the rural vote with John McCain during last year's election. Now, the White House is mounting a summer-long effort to help tailor the administration's agenda to small-town America.

Obama on Tuesday announced a rural tour that will see Cabinet secretaries fan out across the country to discuss issues including broadband deployment, rural health, economic development and agriculture. The tour begins on Wednesday, when Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., Commerce Secretary Gary Locke and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack visit Wattsburg, Pa., to discuss telecommunications issues.

"Rural America is vast and diverse, and different communities face different challenges and opportunities," Obama said in a statement. "That's why we're going out to hear directly from the people of rural America about their needs and concerns and what my administration can do to support them."

House Democrats have their talking point about the cost of the climate change bill, and they’ve been hammering it all day. The average family would pay about “the cost of a postage stamp per day,” as House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland said on Fox News this morning.

But House Republicans have spent the day repeating a different quote from President Obama: that “electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket” under his proposal for a cap and trade system for limiting carbon emissions. “President Obama has said himself that, under this cap-and-trade plan, electricity rates will skyrocket,” Rep. Lynn Jenkins, R-Kan., said at a press conference. Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., repeated the charge on the House floor.

Oops! That wasn’t a very smart thing for Obama to say about the House climate change bill, was it? There’s only one catch: Obama wasn’t talking about the House bill, because it didn’t exist yet. The quote is from a year-and-a-half old interview Obama gave to the San Francisco Chronicle editorial board in January 2008, and it was about the more general cap-and-trade proposal he put out during the campaign.

The White House energy team was working overtime Friday afternoon to line up enough House votes to deliver one of President Obama's biggest legislative priorities: a comprehensive energy bill (HR 2454) that would regulate greenhouse gas emissions.

President Obama, climate czar Carol M. Browner, Interior Secretary Kenneth Salazar and Energy Secretary Steven Chu were among the officials working over undecided Democrats on the hill. One message was a no vote would draw into question Democrats' ability to lead. Officials also were knocking down criticism from Greenpeace USA and other some quarters of the political left that the bill was insubstantial and put politics before science.

Obama put in one more public plug for the measure during a midday news conference with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, saying it represented "enormous progress from where we have been."

For the most part, President Obama has taken a hands-off approach to the health care overhaul effort, outlining general principles and letting Congress write the bill. Today, though, he made a few specific requests in writing, including one that seems more important to him than most: He wants a “hardship waiver” from a proposed requirement that all Americans buy health insurance.

In a letter to Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Chairman Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts and Finance Chairman Max Baucus of Montana, Obama declared that “if we are going to make people responsible for owning health insurance, we must make health care affordable. If we do end up with a system where people are responsible for their own insurance, we need to provide a hardship waiver to exempt Americans who cannot afford it.”

That statement shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone who remembers the Democratic presidential candidate debates last year, in which Obama steadfastly refused to require coverage of individuals — except children — and argued that most uninsured Americans lack coverage not because they don’t want it, but because they can’t afford it.

When Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus laughs, you know President Obama and Congress don’t have their health care plan locked down yet.

This afternoon, Obama met at the White House with Baucus and the other Senate Democrats from the chamber’s two health care panels: Finance and the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee. After the meeting, all pledged full speed ahead on health care, and Baucus said the goal was to have a bill on Obama’s desk by October.

But when asked if the president and Senate Democrats had talked about how to pay for it — perhaps the most difficult part of all — the Montana Democrat’s laugh told pretty much everything we need to know.

“There was some discussion of that,” he said. “It’s all on the table, and we’ll figure that out.”

Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman was the kind of Republican who genuinely made Democrats nervous — a moderate governor who might have been one of the Republicans’ strongest candidates to retake the White House in 2012. So a couple of weeks ago, President Obama found a clever solution. He sent Huntsman to China.

Today, Obama again reached across the aisle for a key administration appointment — nominating Rep. John M. McHugh of New York, the top Republican on the House Armed Services Committee, to become the new secretary of the Army. Once again, Obama will get credit for stocking his administration with more Republicans. And once again, there’s a political side benefit — a chance for the Democrats to win his seat in upstate New York.

It’s a little early to call anyone the front-runner for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination, but Mitt Romney would be on most party insiders’ shortlists. So when he accuses President Obama of short-changing the defense budget, as he did in a speech at the Heritage Foundation this morning, you know we’re getting a reasonably good preview of one of the criticisms Obama will face in his re-election campaign.

And, more likely than not, it’s one of the criticisms he’ll also hear from congressional Republicans between now and then.

Romney claims that Obama’s plans call for reducing the defense budget from nearly 4 percent of GDP now to 3 percent by the end of the next decade, a claim Heritage analysts have also made based on Obama’s long-term budget proposals. That’s not enough, Romney says, to do everything that will need to be done to maintain U.S. military strength over that time: modernize the nuclear arsenal, be prepared to fight land wars and counterinsurgencies, replace aging military equipment, help counterinsurgency efforts in other countries, and be ready to defend against communications disruptions.

There were always hints that Barack Obama was going to try to be the first community organizer president, and now the mass-mobilization drive that became famous during his campaign is gearing up to tackle two of the biggest issues before Congress.

One of them probably won’t be much of a challenge. It’s the other one that presents the real test.

This morning, Organizing for America, the Democratic National Committee group that’s supposed to continue the work of the campaign organizing drive, launched an “action center” to campaign for the confirmation of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. There, Obama supporters can sign an online petition of support; write a letter to the editor of their local paper, with talking points helpfully supplied; or call their senators.

The White House just announced that President Obama is going to pay a visit next week to the Landstuhl Regional Medical Facility in Germany, where U.S. troops wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan go for medical care. If that name sounds familiar, it’s because it was the subject of one of those brief but intense campaign crises last summer, when Obama, returning from a high-profile European tour, canceled a visit to Landstuhl at the last minute.

A quick recap: During his campaign trip to Europe last July, Obama had planned to visit the troops at Landstuhl, then canceled. The campaign of his Republican rival, Sen. John McCain of Arizona, quickly launched a television ad accusing him of changing his plans because “the Pentagon wouldn’t allow him to bring cameras.”

President Obama may not get a lot of help from Congress in designing the detention system he says he wants: something that can hold people who haven’t committed any terrorists acts, but probably will, in a way that’s consistent with the Constitution.

So far, congressional Democrats have no idea how he can do that — which pretty much leaves him with the burden of figuring it out himself.

In his speech on the Guantánamo Bay controversy this morning, Obama said that even after the detention facility closes, he wants to develop a system for holding detainees “who cannot be prosecuted yet who pose a clear danger to the American people.” He called this “the toughest single issue that we will face,” which is an understatement, but he made it clear he’ll ask Congress to be involved in designing the system — a clear break from the Bush administration, which deliberately tried not to involve Congress.

So how’s the Guantánamo Bay debate going so far for Senate Democrats? They’ve already said they’re going to strip out the money President Obama wanted to close the detention facility. But that hasn’t protected them from having to debate the issue. Republicans are still filing amendment after amendment to the supplemental spending bill to ensure that the Democrats keep talking about what to do with the detainees.

Senate majority whip and Obama friend Richard J. Durbin, what have you got?

It was up to Durbin, Obama’s Illinois colleague during his Senate days, to figure out how to argue against the Republican amendments without having a solid post-Gitmo plan to talk about — exactly the situation Senate Democrats wanted to avoid. So in a floor speech this morning, Durbin tried a talking point most Democrats haven’t even mentioned. We already have terrorists on U.S. soil, Durbin said, and they’re not roaming around in our neighborhoods because they don’t get out of prison.

Poor Harry Reid. At this afternoon’s regular Tuesday press briefing, the Senate majority leader was trying to talk about the credit card regulation bill the Senate had just passed, a major priority for President Obama and congressional Democrats. Clearly, he wanted to get lots of questions about that.

But all the reporters wanted to talk about was the apparent Democratic rebellion against Obama on another front: the Senate leadership’s decision not to fund the $80 million Obama wanted to close the Guantánamo Bay detention facility. The money will be stripped out of the supplemental spending bill for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

President Obama has asked Congress to send him a credit card regulation bill by Memorial Day. That day is fast approaching. But the bill has been complicated in the Senate with the addition of a gun amendment that liberal Democrats hate, and there’s probably no way to avoid the issue in the House.

How will the House Democrats get the bill to Obama by the deadline? According to Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer, D-Md., they’ll probably do the only thing they can do: Have separate votes on the credit card bill and the gun amendment, and then merge them together and send the whole package to Obama for his signature.

It’s an acknowledgement that the pro-gun rights majority is now strong enough in both the House and the Senate that neither Obama nor the Democratic leadership are willing to pick fights with them — or put their own priorities in jeopardy.

Already, civil liberties groups are furious at President Obama for reportedly deciding to keep using military commissions to try suspected terrorists, with new rules to give more protections to the detainees. They feel betrayed and think Obama has flip-flopped on an important constitutional issue.

“It is troubling that President Obama has apparently chosen to revive the flawed military commissions he rightly denounced during his campaign,” Virginia Sloan, president of the Constitution Project, said in a statement this morning. “Military commissions are designed to provide lesser due process protections for terrorism suspects than our federal courts do.”

But if you read the words of Senator Barack Obama, D-Ill., you’ll find it’s not clear that he has ever been totally against the idea of military commissions. He certainly left that impression as a presidential candidate, and to some degree, even as a senator.

So far, President Obama has shown he’ll be a lot more flexible with Congress on health care than Bill Clinton was. No pen-waving, veto-threat moments this time. And now it appears that the mass-mobilization drive that’s left over from his campaign will be flexible in mounting a health care campaign, too.

Organizing for America, the mobilizing drive founded by former Obama campaign manager David Plouffe, is raising funds for its campaign to help Obama get a health care overhaul bill through Congress. The plan, according to the fundraising e-mail that went out today, is to “train volunteers, hire organizers, place ads, hold local educational events, bring constituent voices straight to Congress, and make sure your real life stories are heard louder than the lobbyists’ spin.”

But Organizing for America supporters aren’t laying out the policy specifics they’re organizing around. They certainly won’t make any special push on the hot-button issues, such as whether there should be a government-run public health plan to compete with private insurers. Instead, according to spokeswoman Natalie Wyeth, the group will stick to the three general principles Obama outlined yesterday: the final bill must cut health care costs, allow Americans to choose their own doctor and health plan, and give all Americans access to “quality, affordable health care.”

Forget the new Commerce secretary-designate, health care overhaul and those concerns about how stimulus money is being spent.

The biggest news out of the White House on Wednesday concerned the choice of a new first pet. The Obamas have all but selected a Portuguese Water Dog, ending a months-long vetting process that pitted the mid-sized, hypoallergenic breed against the Labradoodle.

First Lady Michelle Obama broke the news to People magazine, saying the family plans to adopt a rescued dog after she and the president take daughters Sasha and Malia on vacation for spring break, in April.

Credit Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., for gaming the selection process.