One major sticking point is a provision that would allow Americans to buy a federal-run insurance plan if their state allows it. Moderates say they worry the so-called public option will become a huge and costly entitlement program and that other requirements in the bill could cripple businesses.

"I don't want to fix the problems in our health care system in a way that creates more of an economic crisis," said Lieberman.

The sway held by such a small group of senators has annoyed their more liberal colleagues, who could vote against a final bill if it becomes too watered down.

Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, said he didn't think rank-and-file Democrats would feel compelled to go that far. At the same time, Brown warned Democratic leaders not to make too many concessions.

"I don't want four Democratic senators dictating to the other 56 of us and to the rest of the country -- when the public option has this much support -- that (a public option is) not going to be in it," said Brown.

The Senate bill would require most Americans to carry insurance and provide subsidies to those who couldn't afford it. Large companies could incur costs if they did not provide coverage to their work force. The insurance industry would come under significant new regulation under the bill, which would first ease and then ban the practice of denying coverage on the basis of pre-existing medical conditions.

Congressional budget analysts put the legislation's cost at $979 billion over a decade and say it would reduce deficits over the same period while extending coverage to 94 percent of the eligible population.

The House approved its version of the bill earlier this month on a near party-line vote of 220-215.

Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, the No. 2 Democrat in the Senate, said the health care bill must be passed by the end of the year so that President Barack Obama and Congress can to shift their attention to the economy and improving employment rates.

Such a timeline also would enable Obama to claim victory on a major domestic priority when he delivers his State of the Union speech in January. With one-third of Senate seats up for election in 2010, politics will factor heavily into the outcome of the debate over health care.

Sen. Michael Bennet, a junior Democrat who will be seeking his first full term next year in Colorado, where many districts lean conservative, said he would support the health care overhaul even if doing so means losing his seat.

"The thing that our working families need more than anything else is to end these double-digit cost increases that they're having every single year with health insurance," Bennet said.

Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York said he believes there are enough votes to include a public insurance option in the bill as long as states were allowed to opt out. To do so, all 58 Democrats and independent Sens. Lieberman and Bernie Sanders of Vermont would have to support it.

Lieberman and Nelson have said they object to the public option. On Sunday, Nelson said he is open to negotiating the provision; he said he would prefer allowing states to opt into the program, instead of having to remove themselves.

Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell said the lingering reservations by moderate Democrats indicate that the party's leaders have gone too far. On Saturday, no Republican voted to begin debate on the bill, which they said would cripple industry and drive up costs for the average American.

"I believe there are a number of Democratic senators who do care what the American people think and are not interested in this sort of arrogant approach that everybody sort of shut up and sit down, get out of the way, we know what's best for you," said McConnell.

Brown, Bennet and McConnell appeared on CNN's "State of the Union." Lieberman appeared on NBC's "Meet the Press." Nelson appeared on ABC's "This Week."

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Associated Press writers Lolita C. Baldor and Philip Elliott contributed to this report.

"Throughout my Senate career I have consistently rejected efforts to obstruct," Nelson said in a statement. "That's what the vote on the motion to proceed is all about. It is not for or against the new Senate health care bill released Wednesday .... If you don't like a bill why block your own opportunity to amend it?"

Another key vote, though, remains uncommitted. Majority Whip Dick Durbin had said Friday that Sen. Blanche Lincoln, D-Ark., had told Reid how she'll vote, implying that she, too, was a yes. He's since walked that back, however, and Lincoln remains publicly uncommitted. So does Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La.

Elsewhere on Salon today, there's a great piece from Joe Conason on Lincoln and her vote. You can read it here.

What they can't ignore, though, is what Gallup found about the GOP's lead among independents. Among that segment of the population, Republicans lead on the generic ballot by a fairly stunning 22 points, up from just one point in July. 

There are reasons that Democrats shouldn't be panicking over these results, at least not yet. Polls are snapshots, pictures of a moment in time, rather than being truly predictive, for one thing. Plus, as Gallup itself points out, "Though the registered-voter results reported here speak to the preferences of all eligible voters, voter turnout is crucial in determining the final outcome of midterm elections."

Problem is, there's another new poll out, this one from Pew, that shows Republicans and those who lean Republican are much more enthusiastic about voting next year than Democrats are. That's not surprising, considering the makeup of the government right now, but it is worth remembering the impact that voter enthusiasm can have on a race -- one need look no further than President Obama's own election to see that.

The other thing that should probably concern progressives about these polling numbers is the potential response from elected Democrats. If they're already nervous about independents turning against them, some -- especially those in more conservative areas -- might decide it's too risky to back all or part of their party's agenda, especially healthcare reform.

That kind of bluntness was probably what Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, of Nevada, was going for when he asked the former president a few days ago to speak to the lunch. Democrats are struggling to hold their members in line so they have the 60 votes needed to block likely GOP attempts to filibuster the legislation. The healthcare bill the House passed Saturday night didn't entirely set conservative Senate Democrats' minds at ease. So Clinton came in to tell the caucus they had to act, even if they didn't love whatever the legislative process produced. And they have to act fast, he said -- by next year, President Obama will have to focus more on the economy to help it recover, and it'll be too late for healthcare.

Clinton, obviously, was the last Democratic president to try to fix the country's healthcare system. Senators said he didn't spend much time dwelling on how the process did or didn't work in 1993 and 1994, but he did remind them that opportunities for reform don't come up that often.

Democrats are still grappling with questions about what kind of public option the Senate's healthcare bill should have, how to handle the abortion restrictions the House put into its bill and how to pay for some of the costs of the legislation. But Sen. Ben Cardin, D-Md., told Salon Clinton didn't get into any of that, preferring to focus on the big picture. Though Clinton took a few questions from senators after speaking, none of them dealt with healthcare, Cardin said.

The former president's Secret Service detail, and the Capitol Police, blocked off several hallways as Clinton left the lunch, but that didn't stop a large crowd from gathering on the second floor, hoping to get a glimpse of, or catch a few words from, him. Clinton obliged, staying for about 10 minutes to take questions from reporters and generally bask in the attention before aides shuttled him out of the building.

But if Stupak, a former state trooper from Michigan, provided the muscle, his partner, Joe Pitts -- a Pennsylvania Republican with decades in the trenches of the antiabortion battle -- may have brought the brains, and more, a new Christian right coalition custom tailored for the Democratic Party's growing religious conservatism. Stupak is Roman Catholic; Pitts is evangelical. Both are members of the predominantly evangelical organization called the Family; Stupak lives in its C Street house. Together, they're poster boys for the evangelical/conservative Catholic alliance known as "co-belligerency," a culture war strategy designed to take territory within the Democratic Party as well the GOP.

Stupak, the Democratic co-chair of the House Pro-Life Caucus, insists that his amendment does nothing more than ensure that the 1976 Hyde Amendment, which forbids the use of federal funds for abortions, is carried over into healthcare reform. Even some of Stupak's angriest critics within the party concede that Stupak might actually believe that -- nobody has ever accused him of being a subtle legislator. (Though Stupak himself, long known for his amiability, now boasts that he was hiding his "wolfiness" all along.) But the facts are plain: Stupak-Pitts will use the Hyde Amendment as a lever with which to radically roll back abortion rights, effectively strong-arming private insurers -- most of which will be enmeshed with the federal government now -- into abandoning coverage for abortions.

Much is being made in the media about the role played by the U.S. Council of Catholic Bishops, which lobbied hard for the amendment. "We just have to accept this as a Catholic thing," goes the new conventional wisdom. Leaving aside the fact that a strong majority of American Catholics are pro-choice, that story line obscures the increasingly significant role played by evangelical conservatives within the Democratic Party.

Start with Stupak and Pitts themselves. Although Stupak is a Catholic, he's lived since at least 2002 in the C Street house run by the Family, which cultivates political leaders on behalf of a long-term vision of what Joe Pitts, speaking at last year's National Prayer Breakfast (the group's only public event), called "God-led government." After the summer sex scandals of Sen. John Ensign, Gov. Mark Sanford and former Rep. Chip Pickering, C Streeters all, made the Capitol Hill address infamous, Stupak denied any knowledge about the house he lives in. "I don't know what you're talking about," Stupak told Michigan reporters when asked about his residence in the house, where he's been enjoying below-market rent for the last seven years, courtesy of C Street's tax-exempt status as a church. But when the Los Angeles Times asked Stupak about his role there in 2002, he pleaded secrecy instead of ignorance: "We sort of don't talk to the press about the house."

That's putting it mildly. In its internal documents, the Family refers to itself as an "invisible organization" and the "prayer cells" into which it organizes politicians as "invisible ‘believing groups.'" That doesn't make it a conspiracy. Rather, the Family represents the soft-sell side of conservative evangelicalism, a social movement that goes beyond -- or maybe beneath -- pulpit pounding and political purity in pursuit of ideological influence on both sides of the aisle. Longtime Family leader Doug Coe, dubbed the "stealth persuader" on Time magazine's list of the 25 most influential evangelicals, declares in a sermon delivered to evangelical leaders that "the more invisible you can make your organization, the more influence it will have."

Joe Pitts can testify to that. It's a safe bet that until Stupak-Pitts, few Americans beyond Pennsylvania Amish country had even heard of the avuncular Republican, a former gym teacher who rarely attaches his name to legislation. And yet he's been a driving force in the antiabortion fight for more than three decades. It was Pitts, a "core" member of the Family, who helped bring antiabortion politics into the organization back in the early 1980s. The Family's focus has always tended toward foreign affairs and economics; Pitts merged the two with the red-hot politics of the abortion wars, quietly exporting free-market fundamentalism and draconian social policy overseas. Pitts and Stupak have joined forces on that front before, teaming up to try to turn President Bush's underfunded but laudable President's Emergency Relief for AIDS initiative into an antiabortion crusade. What they couldn't achieve abroad, they've now brought back home, and then some.

They had plenty of help, starting at the Family's C Street House. It's home not just to Stupak but also to antiabortion Democrats Mike Doyle of Pennsylvania and Heath Shuler of North Carolina, and two of the Senate's fiercest abortion foes, Oklahoma's Tom Coburn -- an obstetrician who once mused on applying the death penalty to abortion providers -- and South Carolina's Jim DeMint, famous for pledging to make healthcare reform Obama's Waterloo. Other Family associates lining up behind Stupak-Pitts include evangelicals Mike McIntyre, D-N.C., John Tanner, D-Tenn., and Lincoln Davis, a Democrat from Tennessee who once proclaimed that no Republican could "outgun, out-pray, or out-family me."

These Family ties don't mean that Stupak-Pitts is a plot hatched at C Street. The Family offers politicians a "worldview," not a vote machine. In the documents stored at the archive of the Fellowship Foundation -- one of the Family's multiple nonprofit entities -- at evangelical Wheaton College, congressional briefings typically lead off with reminders that the Family's prayer groups don't take direct action but rather facilitate the behind-the-scenes relationships that lead to action. "One person grows desirous of pursuing an action," Sen. Sam Brownback, a Family man and former C Street resident, explained the process to me, "and others pull in behind."

Which raises the question: Who's pulling whom? Did backbencher Bart Stupak really come up with the bluff that led pro-choice Democrats to abandon not one but two compromises, one of which Stupak himself seemed to be signing off on earlier this summer? Or was it Pitts, an abortion-wars warrior since the 1970s, and a longtime leader of the House Values Action Team -- an off-the-record caucus of religious right organizations and members of Congress -- who drew up the blueprint?

Neither Stupak nor Pitts is talking. Of course, if they just keep quiet, the press will pin it on the bishops -- who, to be fair, are more than happy to take credit. That version of events neglects the role of relationships forged within the evangelical context of the Family -- a group founded in the spirit of virulent anti-Catholicism, and which maintains to this day that being Catholic brings you no closer to Christ than being Jewish or a Muslim -- and the growing evangelical movement within the Democratic Party. A source close to the Faith Table, a gathering of ostensibly progressive Christians helmed by evangelical leader Jim Wallis, notes that the group has been agitating for Stupak-Pitts for months, with Wallis declaring Stupak-Pitts the most important vote of the year.

He may have been right about that. Right now, even the diluted healthcare reform bill that's limping toward more mauling in the Senate looks like the result of a historic vote. But as a weather vane, Stupak-Pitts tells us which way the wind is blowing. Last time the Democrats possessed this much power in Washington, the Dixiecrats tried to hold the party hostage. Now, it's the faith-based Democrats. Dixiecrats were racists, plain and simple; the faith-based Democrats are a more complicated bunch, a mix of genuinely moral conservatives, many of them to the left on economic issues, political cowards, and default Blue Dogs. They're anti-choice and anti-gay but, by God, they're about love, not hate, a gentler fundamentalism, a faith based in the conflation of Christianity and the Constitution, not the substitution of one for the other. So that's progress, right?

"Sure," says the Faith Table dissident who reports that the council of "progressive Christians" was not willing to even consider any deal that didn't leap past the Hyde Amendment into a new country -- or maybe it's old -- of abortion restrictions. "If you're playing horseshoes with James Dobson." 

Research support provided by the Investigative Fund of the Nation Institute.