The former U.S. senator broke free of the enforced discipline of his party last week when he joined with former Democratic Sen. Tom Daschle to support the president's concept of health-care reform.

President Obama has been beating the bushes hoping to flush out some prominent Republicans who will stand with him in the health-care-reform fight. There is an outside chance that Maine Sen. Olympia Snowe may cast a lone GOP vote for a revised plan from Chairman Max Baucus' Senate Finance Committee. She seems to enjoy being courted by her cross-aisle colleagues. But she remains on the fence.

Which is why the president opened a new front last week by soliciting the support of GOP icons beyond the beltway. He got conditional support from California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger; former senator and surgeon Bill Frist; former Nebraska Sen. Chuck Hagel; one-time Wisconsin Gov. Tommy Thompson, who was Health and Human Services secretary under President George W. Bush; and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, a former Republican- turned-independent.

"These distinguished leaders understand that health-insurance reform isn't a Democratic or Republican issue but an American issue that demands a solution," Obama said in his weekly radio address Saturday.

The Democratic National Committee rushed into production with a TV ad that was to air yesterday featuring "these distinguished leaders." Until Bob Dole demanded that his name and image be removed from the ad. He supports the concept, Dole corrected, but not the president's plan.

So, Obama's "distinguished leaders" are in precisely the same place as their GOP Congressional colleagues - they're all for health-care reform so long as they don't have to vote for it.

They will never vote for it. To do so would give the president a victory that they see as politically untenable. The dimmest bulb in Congress knows that the health-care status quo is unsustainable.

But the GOP's congressional leadership would rather stand pat with a bad hand than help this president fulfill a campaign promise.

So, it's simple. Democrats in Congress will have to go it alone, at least until the vote comes up for final passage. At that point, Sen. Snowe and a few others may cast a vote for the inevitable.

That's what happened in 1935 when Democrats pushed for Social Security and in 1965 when they introduced Medicare. There were almost no votes from Republicans in the committees where those bills were written.

But after it became clear that they couldn't kill those initiatives in committee, a small but significant number of Republicans got on board.

Maybe they will this time. Maybe not. But Democrats must be willing to make a hard choice. They have to be willing to pass it by reconciliation.

That process would allow it to pass the Senate with a simple majority. It was used in 1981 to reconcile language from a dozen committees that wanted to write separate bills to be included in the budget.

By passing the bill as a Medicare reform, it would be eligible for reconciliation as long as the final plan was deficit-neutral. The Congressional Budget Office opened the way for reconciliation last week by ruling that the Senate bill actually would decrease the deficit by 2013.

The process is fillibuster-proof because debate on reconciliation bills is limited to 20 hours and it can pass the Senate with only 51 votes.

It's a risky move. Republicans will yelp like scalded cats claiming that the very fabric of our beloved democracy is imperiled by this move.

But the bigger risk for this president is that he will fail to deliver as promised on the biggest domestic-policy issue he will ever face.

Send e-mail to smithel@phillynews.com or call 215-854-2512. For recent columns: http:// go.philly.com/smith