In a direct acknowledgment that his economic policies are holding back health care reform, President Barack Obama took on critics of his massive federal spending.
“Everybody who’s out there who has been ginned about this idea that the Obama administration wants to spend and spend and spend, the fact of the matter is that we inherited an enormous deficit, enormous long-term debt projections,” Obama said. “We have not reduced it as much as we need to.”
In his fourth prime-time news conference as president, Obama also said Cambridge, Mass., police had “stupidly” arrested noted Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates for breaking into his own house when his keys didn’t work.
The president had hoped to use the forum to promote health care reform, but the news conference amounted largely to a defense of his budget priorities. Obama said those who accused him of spending “a trillion here and a trillion there” were only trying to thwart health reform.
Obama earlier this week had mocked critics of his stimulus and other economic policies who tried to use his record in that area to raise doubts about his push for health care reform.
“I love these folks who helped get us in this mess and then suddenly say, ‘Well, this is Obama’s economy,’ ” the president said at the time. “That’s fine. Give it to me.”
But faced with the very real possibility that his signature legislative issue is at best delayed and at worst going off the rails, Obama changed course and took up an old argument — that the nation’s grim economy is a problem that he inherited.
“What’s been happening in this debate is the American people are understandably queasy about the huge deficits and debt that we’re facing right now,” Obama said. “Let’s understand that, when I came in, we had a $1.3 trillion deficit — annual deficit that we had already inherited. É That was the day I was sworn in; it was already happening.”
Asked why, if he has 60 votes in the Senate, Obama is attacking Republicans when there is significant dissent in his own party about health care reform, the president said he had been “frustrated” by Republican political tactics.
“The politics may dictate that they don’t vote for health care reform because they think, you know, it will make Obama more vulnerable,” he said.
But “in terms of Democrats, the fact of the matter is that because this is a big issue, I think that a lot of Democrats have a lot of different ideas,” Obama said.
One concern among moderate Democrats is that cost savings would mean reduced access to care. Asked directly if he could assure Americans they would not lose health care choices under his plan, the president conceded he could not.
Obama fielded the question about Harvard scholar Gates with a vigor he tends to avoid when dealing with race issues publicly.
“I am standing here as testimony to the progress that’s been made,” said Obama, who attended Harvard Law School in Cambridge. “And yet the fact of the matter is that you know, this still haunts us.”
