While Barack Obama runs for President on an ostensibly ”moderate” health care reform proposal, his accomplice Ted Kennedy is busy putting together the actual program they plan to shove down our throats:

From his sickbed, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy has secretly been orchestrating meetings with lobbyists and lawmakers from both parties to craft legislation that would greet the new president with a plan to provide affordable medical coverage to all Americans, a measure he has called “the cause of my life.”

Obama claims he isn’t for a single-payer system, but he has made no attempt to discourage Kennedy from producing a piece of legislation calling for Medicare-for-all:

Mr. Kennedy is also moving with the knowledge of the presidential candidate who’s now leading in the polls, Sen. Barack Obama.

Here’s how this will come down if “the One” winds up in the White House. He will be presented with the Kennedy legislation in January. And he will sign it, throwing his own phony plan over the side. 

Obama will ask for a few changes just for CYA, but the plan we end up with will be just the sort of single-payer boondoggle he and his supporters claim he doesn’t want.

Then there will be the inevitable appeal an to public sympathy because Kennedy is going to kick the bucket soon, and this is likely to be his final hoorah in the Senate:

There will be a very strong impulse in the Congress to do things for him, especially things he really cares about, and health care would be at the top of that list.

There is no word, of course, on what Mary Jo Kopechne thinks of Kennedy’s plan.