Late in the evening on November 7, I was driving through McLean, Virginia, listening to C-SPAN Radio coverage of a press conference by House Democratic leaders following the chamber’s narrow approval of a comprehensive health care bill.

At the time, it’s likely that I was passing the large homes of at least a couple business lobbyists who live in the tony Washington suburb.

No doubt they were still up and following closely the House vote that occurred during the 24th hour of that fall Saturday. They must have been relieved by the outcome.

Despite having 258 members, the House Democratic majority garnered only two votes more than the minimum to pass the bill—and one of those was from a Republican representing a liberal district. The employer mandates contained in the measure, along with its other provisions, are on somewhat shaky ground.

The legislation has something less than irresistible momentum as it heads into conference committee negotiations with whatever Senate bill emerges. As my colleague Jeremy Smerd points out, employers have a better chance of getting what they want in the Senate.

Business community criticism of the House health care measure is similar to what I heard at recent hearings on bills that would provide workers with paid sick days and prohibit sexual-orientation discrimination in the workplace.

Employers are leery of Washington telling them how to run their businesses and manage their employees. They want the flexibility to design health care and leave policies that best fit their workforces.

“SHRM has strong concerns with the one-size-fits-all mandate encompassed in the Healthy Families Act [the sick leave bill],” said Elissa O’Brien, vice president of human resources at Wingate Healthcare, who testified at a November 10 hearing on behalf of SHRM. “At a time when employers are facing unprecedented challenges, imposing a costly paid leave mandate on employers could easily result in additional job loss or cuts in other important employee benefits.”

O’Brien outlined her Needham, Massachusetts-based company’s generous paid-time-off policies. SHRM asserts that employers like Wingate should be exempt from federal leave directives.

At the November 5 hearing on the discrimination bill, witnesses acknowledged that the vast majority of Fortune 500 companies have policies that protect homosexual workers, who are seen as a key component of the talent pool.

Most Democrats in the House and Senate majorities, however, don’t want to depend solely on the market to provide sick days to employees and protect them from discrimination. They believe that achieving those social gains requires the intervention of Congress and the courts.

In some cases, they may be right. In other cases, they may be imposing overbearing government.

But it’s hard to deny one of their ripostes to employer criticism of the legislation: The economy has consistently prospered even after companies have warned that particular bills would undermine their ability to turn a profit.

At the hearing on paid sick days, Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Connecticut, noted that business was in a lather about the Family and Medical Leave Act before it was signed into law in 1993. There were predictions of job losses and other setbacks.

“We haven’t seen that to be the case with FMLA,” DeLauro said.

Another frequent argument against employment legislation is that it will open the floodgates to lawsuits. Sen. Al Franken, D-Minnesota, pushed back against that trope, noting that Minnesota has had a sexual-orientation discrimination law in place since 1993 and has not had its courts filled with related cases.

“Minnesota’s sky has not fallen,” Franken said at the November 5 hearing.

Employers sound convincing when they say that FMLA causes administrative nightmares. Heads nod when they maintain that some employment laws generate costly lawsuits.

But if their arguments are going to resonate in a Congress with strong Democratic majorities, they have to show examples of real job losses or investment that was spiked because of Washington mandates.

Otherwise, the natural skill, resilience and ingenuity of American corporations fosters the notion that they can survive any bill that comes out of Washington.

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.

So far, President-elect Barack Obama’s Cabinet and White House appointments have had a “dog in the nighttime” effect on Republicans. The selections, like the intruder in the Sherlock Holmes mystery, haven’t made them bark.

The reason the dog remained quiet, Holmes deduced, is because he knew the late-night visitor who stole the race horse Silver Blaze before a major race. The dog’s sanguine reaction helped the fictional detective narrow the list of suspects.

Similar to the stable dog, Republicans have kept quiet—or even voiced support—of Obama’s choices for economic and national security leadership positions.

The people Obama tapped to head the Treasury, the National Economic Council and his Economic Recovery Advisory Board—Timothy Geithner, Lawrence Summers and Paul Volcker, respectively—are generally centrist and soothing to Republicans.

On national security, Obama even allowed a Republican, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, to remain in place for the next year.

Having stayed in the middle of the road on economic and national security personnel, Obama is now free to swerve to the left in selecting a secretary of labor. With this choice, he is likely to satisfy progressives—formerly known as liberals—and organized labor.

Both groups played a significant role in putting Obama in office, and they’ve been patiently waiting for a Cabinet appointment that they can celebrate. Republicans will growl.

I’m not going to guess who Obama will place at the Labor Department helm, but it almost certainly will be someone who supports the Employee Free Choice Act, the so-called card-check bill, and who vows to use the agency’s regulatory and enforcement mechanisms to crack down on employers.

In an Obama administration, the Department of Labor, along with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the National Labor Relations Board, “will be emboldened (and further funded with bigger budgets) to pursue aggressive investigations against employers for wage and hour violations, unfair labor practice charges and charges of unlawful discrimination,” writes Gerald L. Maatman Jr., a partner at Seyfarth Shaw in Chicago, in a November 24 report.

Two people whose names have been mentioned as potential Labor secretaries—former Rep. David Bonior and NLRB member Wilma Liebman—recently spoke in favor of the unionization bill at a November 20 event in Washington.

Greater unionization would be a step toward “enlightened capitalism,” Bonior said. In such an economy, workers on Main Street will get as much attention and support as financiers on Wall Street.

More Americans will rise to the middle class through the wages and benefits they receive in collective bargaining, according to Bonior.

“It’s not a coincidence that the widening income gap in the United States of America tracks the decline in union density,” Bonior said.

Liebman foresees a major overhaul of employment law during the Obama administration, with the card-check bill serving as the foundation.

“Everything starts with being able to win union representation in the workplace,” she said.

Bonior has ruled himself out of contention for labor secretary. Liebman said she won’t turn down a job she hasn’t been offered. Regardless of who takes over the department, it is likely to play a prominent role in Obama’s effort to address economic woes.

In fact, by giving Obama a decisive electoral vote victory, Americans may be signaling that they want Washington to be more involved in the economy.

“With the election occurring against the backdrop of housing, financial and automaker crises, a consumer confidence rate at the lowest level in recorded history, a plunging stock market that eviscerated 401(k) plans and other retirement savings accounts, as well as the highest unemployment rate since 2001, the electorate is increasingly distrustful of the private sector and more willing to rely on government initiatives to secure their future,” Maatman writes.

As you might imagine, the issue of immigration was a prominent topic at the first National Summit on American Competitiveness in Washington on Tuesday, September 18. Here’s the story I posted for our News in Brief page:

Scholar Urges HR to Work with Schools (9/18/07)

I didn’t have space to get into immigration, so I’ll do that here. On the first panel of the day, there was an interesting exchange about raising visa limits for highly skilled immigrants.

A couple participants said that retaining more of the foreign science and technology students who study at our universities—and bringing high-tech professionals in from other countries—is critical for the future of the U.S. economy. 

At the very least, they want H-1B visa levels raised from a 65,000 annual cap to 115,000, as would have been done in the now-dormant Senate comprehensive immigration bill.

“We need to attract the best and the brightest,” said Chad Holliday Jr., chairman and CEO of DuPont. “We’re going to have to take a few risks on visas to get the best people in.”

Floyd Kvamme, a partner emeritus at Kleiner Perkins, a high-tech venture capital firm, called for H-1B visa policy to be addressed in a stand-alone bill. He also advocated for an increase in employment-based green cards.

He made a good point that the international students who earn their degrees from U.S. institutions and then are forced to go home might end up undermining U.S. prosperity.

“Now they’re real competitors,” he said.

It fell to Michael Porter, a Harvard Business School professor, to inject a dose of skepticism. He cautioned that throwing open the immigration gates isn’t a panacea. That approach needs to be leavened with other reforms.

“We can’t use that as a reason for not training our own people,” he said. “That takes the pressure off” improving the U.S. educational system.

Of course, the United States needs to welcome immigrants—especially those who are going to create the next Google or develop a cure for cancer or even build the next overpriced condominium complex in Arlington, Virginia.

But it would be refreshing if we could also focus on Americans who might be hurt in the process without resorting to conservative, or liberal, bromides about the dangers of the global economy.

We need politicians who are willing to approach issues in the way that Porter does—acknowledging both sides of the argument, offering some doubts and proposing solutions.

Too often on immigration, all we hear are the passionate advocates mixing it up with the passionate opponents. But the middle ground is where the real hard work is done.