On Monday, October 26, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid may have initiated a turning point in health care reform.

He indicated that a government-run insurance program for people under 65, a so-called public option, would be included in the measure that goes to the Senate floor next month.

Now Washington pundits are furiously doing the math, trying to figure out whether Reid, D-Nevada, has 60 votes to overcome a filibuster and send a sweeping health care bill to President Barack Obama’s desk. Of course the House will play some role as well.

This routine has been a staple of capital life since last November. That’s when Democrats took control of the White House and increased their margins in the House and the Senate, where their caucus has reached a filibuster-proof 60 members.

Every time a major piece of legislation comes along, there is the mandatory calculation to figure out whether Democrats can come up with 60 votes, either by holding their own ranks together or drawing in a couple Republicans.

But winning elections has another—and perhaps more profound—effect on governance when one party controls both the Senate and White House. Its nominees for administration positions are almost certain to be confirmed.

Personnel is policy, goes the Washington saying. The reason that aphorism has been repeated to the point of becoming a cliché is because it’s true. One of the most cherished spoils of political victory is determining who serves at government’s highest levels.

In the polite society of the Senate, the rule in the past has been that a president pretty much gets to appoint the nominees of his (one day “her”) choice unless they have a criminal background or are otherwise egregiously unfit for office.

But Obama’s rival for the White House, Sen. John McCain, has halted the confirmation process for one of the president’s nominees for the National Labor Relations Board because of policy differences.

In an October 21 hearing of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, McCain opposed Craig Becker, who currently serves as associate general counsel for the AFL-CIO and the Service Employees International Union.

Echoing Becker criticisms from the business community, McCain expressed qualms about some of Becker’s articles about labor-management relations. The Yale Law School graduate doesn’t mince words when it comes to organizing in the workplace.

In an excerpt from a 1993 University of Minnesota Law Review article highlighted in a U.S. Chamber of Commerce letter to the HELP Committee, Becker writes that “employers should be stripped of any legally cognizable interest in their employees’ election of representatives.” With his trademark irascibility, McCain first insisted on a roll-call vote on Becker. Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa and HELP Committee chairman, said that NLRB nominees are typically voted on as a bloc. Becker was being considered along with two others.

But Harkin acquiesced and allowed a separate vote on Becker. “How generous of you,” McCain sneered through a smile.

Becker was approved by a 15-8 vote, but McCain vowed to block a Senate floor vote by placing a “hold” on him. It is the prerogative of each senator to put a hold on any nominee for any reason.

McCain said that all the commotion could have been avoided if Harkin had agreed to a hearing for Becker. Harkin responded that it is Senate tradition not to conduct hearings for members of the NLRB other than the chair.

Sen. Mike Enzi, R-Wyoming, also voted to uphold Senate tradition. He approved Becker along with all the other nominees in the package that was presented to the HELP Committee on October 21.

It may be true that Becker deserves more scrutiny than the usual NLRB nominee. Several senators would like to know whether he still holds what some call “radical” views of labor-management relations. Others want to know what role Becker may have played in the vote-buying scandal that drove former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich out of office.

But there was a more straightforward way for McCain to put the kibosh on Becker. He wouldn’t be hassling with this nominee if he had won the White House in November. It’s one more reason why elections matter.

Before casting the only Republican vote in Congress so far for a health care reform proposal on October 13, Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine cautioned that the journey toward final legislation has “miles to go.”

Now the two Senate bills and three in the House have to be combined into one in each chamber. The bills that the Senate and House approve are likely to be divergent and require potentially tense bicameral negotiations. Then each chamber votes again on the product that comes out of conference.

If you need evidence that this process is likely to take weeks, look at the situation with legislation to extend unemployment benefits.

The urgency of the matter is not in question. Congress has acted twice so far during the recession to add up to 53 weeks of unemployment benefits to the normal 26 weeks.

But now unemployment has reached 9.8 percent, and most experts believe it will continue to climb. At a hearing of the Senate Finance Committee last month, witnesses testified that there are about 3 million job openings for 15 million people seeking work.

As of September, nearly 5.4 million people have been unemployed for 27 weeks or longer, Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-New Hampshire, said in an October 15 speech on the Senate floor. Nearly 2 million will exhaust unemployment benefits by the end of the year.

The House approved legislation September 22 that would extend unemployment insurance benefits for an additional 13 weeks for people who live in states with an unemployment rate of 8.5 percent or more.

But when the bill got to the Senate, Shaheen was one of the senators who held it up in order to expand it. New Hampshire’s unemployment rate is lower than 8.5 percent, and Shaheen didn’t want her jobless constituents to be left out.

Shaheen joined Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nevada, and Sens. Max Baucus, D-Montana, and Jack Reed, D-Rhode Island, to introduce a bill October 8 that would extend unemployment benefits for 14 weeks for workers in all 50 states. They would fund for the bill by extending a surtax on employers through June 2011.

They wanted to push the bill through the Senate that day, but Republicans slowed down the process. They said that they hadn’t had a chance to study the measure and wanted an opportunity to introduce amendments.

It looks as if the Senate will act on an unemployment extension during the week of October 19. Among the amendments that Republicans are likely to offer would be one to finance the unemployment extension with money from the $787 billion stimulus package Congress passed earlier this year rather than by increasing taxes on employers.

It’s not certain whether the Republican amendments will succeed, but Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Arizona, said that prospects for action on unemployment extension are “very good.”

Republicans want to have their say in shaping the bill, but it doesn’t look as if they will filibuster it. The political price—when so many Americans are facing long-term unemployment—is too high.

But even an issue that seems to be a slam-dunk has nuances. It’s inaccurate—and heartless—to say that more benefits will enervate the motivation of a jobless person, according to Gary Burtless, the Whitehead Chair in Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution in Washington.

Instead, an extension will make the labor market more efficient by allowing the unemployed to “look longer and harder for a job in which their skills will be fully utilized,” Burtless testified at a Senate Finance Committee hearing in September.

But at the same meeting, Douglas Holmes, president of UWC-Strategic Services, argued that federal dollars would be better spent creating sustainable jobs. Extending unemployment is “an inefficient use of funds,” he said in an interview.

“Employment is the goal, not the number of weeks of unemployment,” Holmes said.

Shaheen differed on that point in her October 15 Senate speech.

“It’s the right investment to make in our economy,” she said. “People are counting on us to act now.”

But “now” in the Senate can mean several weeks. Just wait until health care reform gets to the floor.

Jack Gross blends into a crowd after a Capitol Hill hearing.

The short, unassuming 61-year-old Iowan reminds me of people I knew growing up in Indiana. He’s plain-spoken and friendly. He could have stepped out of the Norman Rockwell painting that he says his childhood in Mt. Ayer, Iowa, resembled.

Over the course of two days in Washington during the week of October 5, Gross starred in a news conference and congressional hearing, beginning a political journey that could make him this year’s Lilly Ledbetter.

Like Ledbetter, Gross is that the heart of a controversial Supreme Court ruling. Her case centered on pay discrimination; his revolves around age discrimination. Congress passed a bill to overturn her case and vows to do the same for Gross’ case.

Goodyear paid Ledbetter less for her factory supervisor position than it paid her male colleagues, Ledbetter alleged. But the Supreme Court ruled in 2007 that she had not filed suit before the statute of limitations expired.

Ledbetter asserted that she didn’t know that Goodyear was shortchanging her until decades after it made the first unfair pay decision. Earlier this year, Congress approved a bill that renewed the statute of limitations each time a worker receives a paycheck diminished by discrimination.

The bill was the first that President Barack Obama enacted. He knew Ledbetter well before she showed up for the bill-signing ceremony in the East Room of the White House, because she had campaigned with him.

From the time of the court’s decision in the spring of 2007 until Congress passed a bill bearing her name last January, Ledbetter grew into a political symbol for Democrats.

As the party battled the threat of a Republican filibuster in the Senate and a veto by then-President George W. Bush, Ledbetter became a political touchstone for women’s groups and for Obama, who was working to appeal to supporters of then-Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Gross also represents a powerful constituency: older Americans. One of Washington’s behemoth lobbying organizations—AARP—is putting its weight behind the Gross bill.

What is most compelling about Gross is his story. He suffered chronic ulcerated colitis in his youth and worked his way through college. Upon graduation, he took a job with the insurer Farm Bureau in Iowa, where he has been employed for about 30 years. He worked for several years in the late 1970s until 1987 for a seed company, then returned to Farm Bureau.

Gross was eventually promoted to the position of claims administration vice president. He consistently received strong evaluations and developed an insurance policy package that is an exclusive Farm Bureau product.

But when the company’s Iowa and Kansas operations merged earlier this decade, Gross asserts that all claims department employees in Iowa with a rank of supervisor or higher were forced to take demotions. Many of his tasks were reassigned to younger workers.

Gross filed suit in 2003. He has been battling the company ever since but continues to work there, which means that he has had to “endure retaliation for exercising a legal right,” he said in prepared testimony.

The written statement he submitted for the record at an October 7 hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee was even more poignant than his brief remarks.

“Many of my friends are also farm or small-town kids who now feel like they are the forgotten minority,” Gross wrote. “Some have been aggressively looking for work for months, only to find doors close when they reveal the year they graduated. This fight has become more about them than it is for me.”

He is upset that his name is now associated with a case that has made it harder for plaintiffs to prevail in age discrimination suits.

 “That’s a heavy burden to place on one guy who simply tried to right one single act of age discrimination,” he said in an interview.

As is the situation with so many employment lawsuits, if Farm Bureau had used Midwestern common sense and treated a high performer fairly, regardless of his age, the Gross lawsuit and the resulting bill could have been avoided.