According to football fan James Carville, we’ll know whether the Obama administration is a playoff caliber franchise within the next few months. “It’s the third quarter, [Obama is] down by a point, and he’s got his best player on the bench – what really is going to be important is the fall,” Carville is quoted as saying in the Politico this morning. In the past few days, there have been dozens of stories about Obama’s falling poll numbers, the looming breakup of the progressive coalition, and the gathering tea party revolt.

When team Obama huddled up this morning, and the key players looked up at the scoreboard,  they probably got butterflies in their stomachs, as they realized that it’s now do or die time. Apparently, team Obama has decided to keep the ball in the hands of their best player, the cool, steady quarterback President Obama.  But if team Obama is about to begin a crucial drive in the game, which will include major legislative battles over cap & trade and health care reform, that raises the question: How does team Obama define victory?

Listening to Carville, it sounds like victory will be defined strictly in terms of political football–two-minute offense style:  “If he gets what’s perceived to be some kind of a major health care thing, gets the climate bill through, if the economy recovers, then we’ll all say he had a hell of a summer. Conversely, if the thing falls apart, we’ll say that by July the 19th we could tell the thing was going bad.” You see, the Obama administration will win as long as it can get some sort of cap & trade thingy and health care thingy rammed through Congress before football season begins, at which time Carville can kick his feet up and watch his beloved LSU Tigers.

Presumably, team Obama would be more interested in the details of these legislative thingies than would Carville,  but I’m not so sure. Is it even possible to write effective legislation under team Obama’s frenetic run-and-shoot approach? Very few, if any, Representatives read the Waxman-Markey bill before voting on it. Yet that 1,500+ page monstrosity of hastily constructed regulations, counterintuitive energy taxes, and rent-seeking giveaways is expected to have very little impact on CO2 emissions for years to come.

In its current form, health care reform legislation would dish out its pain–ugh, I mean results–more immediately, but that’s assuming that current proposals are not radically altered to ensure passage. As the pressure to pass something, anything is ratcheted up in the next few weeks, how can we expect effective, carefully crafted legislation to come out of such a desperate process?

Does team Obama really care how they get the ball into the endzone? They expect (or hope) that the economy will rebound in 2010, when a larger share of the stiumulus money will kick in, just in time for the midterm elections. The key players understand that the health of the economy is mostly determined by “natural” factors, not governmental policy. The U.S. economy has been a powerhouse for decades in spite of excessive government intervention,  crony corporatism, nanny state social policies.

Given these realities, team Obama has added incentive to throw long passes down the field, like cap & trade and health care reform. Assuming that the economy does rebound by next year, the administration would then be in a position to attach some of the credit to policies that had nothing to do with the economic rebound, touting things like new “green” jobs, health care savings, and enhanced financial regulations–a narrative that would be amplified by the mainstream media.

On the other hand, if the economy does not rebound by next year, team Obama will likely be pinned in at the goal line for the remainder of its first term, regardless of whether cap & trade and health care reform are passed.

As usual, team Obama is cocky of victory. White House Deputy Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer says, “Obama and his team have been down this road dozens of times and been declared dead many times and always succeeded,” he said. “No one gets rich betting against Barack Obama.” It is far from a sure thing, however, that team Obama will prevail in the weeks to come.  Although I’m always skeptical about there being such a thing as a “moderate” Democrat–the Blue Dogs are usually all bark and no bite– we’re beginning to see signs of possible voter backlash against the progressive Move On axis of the Democratic Party.