White House press secretary Robert Gibbs is getting frustrated with reporters pressing him about whether President Barack Obama has abandoned the idea that a government-run insurance plan be included in health care reform.

Gibbs is being pummeled because Obama seemed to indicate in a weekend appearance in Colorado that the so-called public option was optional. Then on the Sunday morning television political talk shows, White House surrogates suggested the same thing.

“I got to tell you, this is one of the more curious things I’ve ever seen in my life,” Gibbs said Monday, August 17. “I was on a Sunday show, I said the same thing about a public option that I’ve said for I don’t know how many weeks.”

Gibbs is absolutely right. His boss has been dancing around the public option ever since health care reform began this spring.

“We have a goal of fostering choice and competition in a private health insurance market,” Gibbs said Tuesday, August 18. “The president prefers the public option as a way of doing that. If others have ideas, we’re open to those ideas and willing to listen to those details.”

The public option is the lightning rod of health care reform. Progressives, formerly known as liberals, call it the most important part of the legislation because they say a government plan would provide competition for private insurance.

The Congressional Progressive Caucus, numbering about 81 members, is pushing back hard against a potential Obama cave-in on the public option.

Republicans monolithically oppose a public option. They say that it will lead to a government takeover of the health care system and run into the same problems that have undermined the stability of Medicare. Many in the corporate community say the public option would lure people away from employer coverage.

Obama has resolutely refused to take a position. Here’s what he said at a town hall meeting Saturday, August 15, in Grand Junction, Colorado: “The public option, whether we have it or don’t have it, is not the entirety of health care reform. This is just one sliver of it, one aspect of it.”

Obama is acting more like a legislator, which he was in the Illinois statehouse and the U.S. Senate, than an executive. He’s hovering over the debate, ready to swoop in and align himself with the winning side rather than forge ahead with a specific prescription that might fail.

This approach contrasts sharply with what we saw from the nation’s preceding chief executive. President George W. Bush displayed a my-way-or-the-highway attitude. He fought with Congress as often as he worked with it.

On the other hand, Obama tends to appeal to all sides of a debate. When he conducts a town hall meeting, he seems to agree with everyone. What he fails to do is outline his own plan.

He talks in generalities about goals that most Democrats and Republicans share—for instance, no insurance exclusions for pre-existing conditions—and avoids any mention of sacrifices that Americans will have to make to achieve lower health care costs. Reform medicine will go down with no bitter aftertaste, Obama implies.

Obama is remaining true to his roots as a professor. He loves to analyze an issue, exploring all sides and making articulate pro and con arguments. It can be captivating. Having a cerebral president is a good thing.

But when a brainy president launches into a thinking-out-loud mode, he can find himself stepping on the toes of Capitol Hill allies rather than watching their backs.

This can create a problem when he’s dealing with the motivated and unified Republican opposition. He’ll need all the help he can get from Democratic friends he may be throwing overboard with his temporizing about the public option.

Republicans are bringing up legitimate objections to health care bills floating around the Hill. In doing so, they’re also trying to build a foundation for success in 2010.

“Many Republicans have tasted power,” Deloitte director and former Rep. Tom Davis, R-Virginia, told me in an interview earlier this year. “They’re not in a minority mode. They want to get back in the majority.”

Despite rock-bottom approval ratings, Bush had extraordinary success in bending a Democratic Congress to his will. If Obama continues to be a legislator rather than an executive, his party may not be able to keep its grip on Capitol Hill.