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"I like to say I gave up an eight-minute commute for an eight-hour commute," he says wearily, running a hand though salt-and-pepper hair as he watches his two sons play basketball for the first time this season. After the aging General Motors plant where he worked for 23 years was idled about a year ago, Hanley faced a Hobson's choice: Stay with his family and search for an autoworker's salary ($28 an hour) in a county where more than 40 percent of its manufacturing jobs disappeared from 2006 to 2009. Or hang on to his GM paycheck and health insurance and follow the job, no matter where it leads. In his case, it led to Fairfax, Kan., the same place his brother and two brothers-in-law — also GM workers, and now his roommates — landed. For others, it has been Indiana or Texas. The long commute is not just a story of hard times, tough choices and a shrinking American auto industry. It's also a case study of what happens when an aging industrial town loses an anchor, when workers too old to start over and too young to retire are caught in a squeeze and when economic survival means one family, but two far-flung ZIP codes.

Why haven't the President and Senate Democrats pulled the reconciliation trigger before now? I haven't spoken directly with the President or with Harry Reid but I've spent the last several weeks sounding out contacts on the Hill and in the White House to find an answer. Here are the theories. None of them justifies waiting any longer. Reconciliation is too extreme a measure to use on a piece of legislation so important. I hear this a lot but it's bunk. George W. Bush used reconciliation to enact his giant tax cut bill in 2003 (he garnered only 50 votes for it in the Senate, forcing Vice President Cheney to cast the deciding vote). Six years before that, Bill Clinton rounded up 51 votes to enact the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP), the largest expansion of taxpayer-funded health insurance coverage for children in the U.S. since Medicaid began in the 1960s. Through reconciliation, we also got Medicare Advantage. Also through reconciliation came the COBRA act, which gives Americans a bit of healthcare protection after they lose a job ("reconciliaton is the "R" in the COBRA acronym.) These were all big, important pieces of legislation, and all were enacted by 51 votes in the Senate. Use of reconciliation would infuriate Senate Republicans. It may. So what? They haven't given Obama a single vote on any major issue since he first began wining and dining them at the White House. In fact, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and company have been doing everything in their power to undermine the President. They're using the same playbook Republicans used in the first two years of the Clinton administration, hoping to discredit the President and score large victories in the midterm elections by burying his biggest legislative initiative. Indeed, Obama could credibly argue that Senate Republicans have altered the rules of the Senate by demanding 60 votes on almost every initiative - a far more extensive use of the filibuster than at any time in modern history - so it's only right that he, the President, now resort to reconciliation. Obama needs Republican votes on military policy so he doesn't dare antagonize them on health care. I hear this from some quarters but I don't buy it. While it's true that Dems are skeptical of Obama's escalation of the war in Afghanistan and that Republicans are his major backers, it seems doubtful R's would withdraw their support if the President forced their hand on health care. Foreign policy is the one area where Republicans have offered a halfway consistent (and always bellicose) voice, and Dick Cheney et al would excoriate them if they failed to back a strong military presence in the Middle East. This is truer now than ever. Reid fears he can't even get 51 votes in the Senate now, after Scott Brown's win. Reid counts noses better than I do, but if Senate Democrats can't come up with even 51 votes for the health care reforms they enacted weeks ago they give new definition to the term "spineless." Besides, if this is the case, Obama ought to be banging Senate heads together. A president has huge bargaining leverage because he presides over an almost infinite list of future deals. Lyndon Johnson wasn't afraid to use his power to the fullest to get Medicare enacted. If Obama can't get 51 Senate votes out of 58 or 59 Dems and Independents, he definitely won't be able to get 51 Senate votes after November. Inevitably, the Senate will lose some Democrats. Now's his last opportunity. House and Senate Democrats are telling Obama they don't want to take another vote on health care or even enact it before November's midterms because they're afraid it will jeopardize their chances of being reelected and may threaten their control over the House and Senate. I hear this repeatedly but if it's true Republicans have done a far better job scaring Americans about health care reform than any pollster has been able to uncover. Most polls still show a majority of Americans still in favor of the basic tenets of reform - expanded coverage, regulations barring insurers from refusing coverage because of someone's preexisting conditions and preventing insurers from kicking someone off the rolls because they get sick, requirements that employers provide coverage or pay into a common pool, and so on. And now that many private insurers are hiking up premiums, co-pays, and deductibles, the public is even readier to embrace reform.

In a direct challenge to Democratic leadership, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) introduced an amendment on Thursday night that would prohibit Congress from using reconciliation to make changes to Medicare. Framed as an effort to protect the sanctity of entitlement programs, McCain's measure would deprive Democrats of a stream of revenue for their health care bill. The party has targeted hundreds of billions of dollars in cuts and savings to the Medicare program that it would turn around and use to pay for other reforms. But for McCain to be the Republican face behind this effort is to distract, a bit, from its seriousness. The Senator has a fairly lengthy history of voting for reconciliation bills that do exactly what his current amendment prohibits: change Medicare. As pointed out by a Democratic source on the Hill, the Arizona Republican has voted for nine out of 13 reconciliation bills that have been offered during his time in the Senate. Of those nine, four included cuts to Medicare.