Really bad news on the health care front. After making the case for a public option, and doing it very well, Obama said this: "We have not drawn lines in the sand other than that reform has to control costs and that it has to provide relief to people who don't have health insurance or are underinsured," Mr. Obama said. "Those are the broad parameters that we've discussed." There he goes again, gratuitously making a big gift to the other side. My big fear about Obama has always been not that he doesn't understand the issues, but that his urge to compromise -- his vision of himself as a politician who transcends the old partisan divisions -- will lead him to negotiate with himself, and give away far too much. He did that on the stimulus bill, where he offered an inadequate plan in order to win bipartisan support, then got nothing in return -- and was forced to reduce the plan further so that Susan Collins could claim her pound of flesh. And now he's done it on a key component of health care reform. What was the point of signaling, right at this crucial moment, that he's willing to give away the public plan? Let alone doing it at the very moment that he was making such a good case for it?
Really bad news on the health care front. After making the case for a public option, and doing it very well, Obama said this:
"We have not drawn lines in the sand other than that reform has to control costs and that it has to provide relief to people who don't have health insurance or are underinsured," Mr. Obama said. "Those are the broad parameters that we've discussed."
There he goes again, gratuitously making a big gift to the other side.
My big fear about Obama has always been not that he doesn't understand the issues, but that his urge to compromise -- his vision of himself as a politician who transcends the old partisan divisions -- will lead him to negotiate with himself, and give away far too much. He did that on the stimulus bill, where he offered an inadequate plan in order to win bipartisan support, then got nothing in return -- and was forced to reduce the plan further so that Susan Collins could claim her pound of flesh.
And now he's done it on a key component of health care reform. What was the point of signaling, right at this crucial moment, that he's willing to give away the public plan? Let alone doing it at the very moment that he was making such a good case for it?
his urge to compromise -- his vision of himself as a politician who transcends the old partisan divisions -- will lead him to negotiate with himself, and give away far too much.
No, it's because he's the frog on the lily pad, always jumping half the distance necessary to get to where america needs to be. He thinks he's being reasonable, but the problem is that he never gets there at all. cos he's always only halfway there.
And he does the frog jumps cos he's confused being assertive about the minimum necessary with being radical. And he'd rather fail to achieve what he needs than be considered radical because as Matt Taibbi wrote a long while back, "he is a largely self-satisfied exponent of the status quo". keep to the Fen Causeway
