Washington Post — Obama to Take On Health-Care Critics
Writer Anne Kornblut captures the breathless, outraged tones of the White House and its supporters on health care who believe the president is the victim of a powerful conspiracy.
Today, President Obama heads to Montana for a town hall, with anther one in Colorado on Saturday. Including his stop in New Hampshire, the president has chosen three of the most libertarian states in which to make his argument for a big government plan.
While his team would say it’s just another example of the president dealing with opponents head-on, one starts to wonder if there isn’t a hope that Obama will have the chance to face off with, as the DNC calls them, a “Deather.” New Hampshire produced none as the selected questioners were saccharine-sweet, but today might be the day that the White House gives the microphone to a Walter Sobchak-type. The risk is another “spread the wealth around” gaffe by Obama. The reward would be the chance to show the president suffering for his efforts, but still willing to engage with a country not-quite worthy of him.
The worse things get for the president on health, the more willing the administration may be to take chances.
Part of the problem with refusing to believe that the opposition to the plan is actually organic is that Democrats stop listening entirely and treat real concerns of senior citizens and small business owners as part of some crazy conspiracy.
Kornblut certainly finds the party in a mood to keep the fight going.
“Worried about the potential for a harsh reception, the Montana Democratic Party sent an e-mail to supporters Thursday urging them to show up Friday.
‘Last fall, when Swiftboaters and special interests attacked President Obama, folks like you came to his defense,’ wrote Anna Gustina, who was the 2008 state director of Organizing for America, a grass-roots arm of the Obama presidential campaign. ‘We knocked on doors, talked to neighbors, and made our voices heard. Now, we need to do it again.’”
New York Times — Ad Campaign Counterattacks Against Overhaul’s Critics
Strange bedfellows alert! Writer Katharine Seelye seems surprised that drug companies, doctors and a big labor union would team up to spend $12 million selling the president’s still-undefined health-care proposal. There’s nothing unusual about special interests who all stand to benefit from a bill teaming up to sell it. The campaign shows backing from narrow interests, not evidence of broad-based support.
More hilariously, Seeyle portrays the effort as an attempt to push back against the U.S. Chamber’s recent ad buy warning of crippling deficits promised by a national health plan. What makes it funny is that proponents have outspent opponents all along and PhRMA is spending more than $100 million to get a plan passed that would create new markets for their drugs and provide new anti-competitive protections.
Tom Hamburger at the L.A. Times writes about the details of the previously secret deal between the Obama administration and PhRMA in which drug makers made a hazy promise of $80 million in savings over the next decade in exchange for lots and lots of goodies. But more than the $80 billion promise, PhRMA is providing Obama money and clout to help sell the package now.
And as Bloomberg reports today, of the 3,300 health lobbyists currently plying the 535 members of congress, the pharmaceutical industry is the biggest hitter of all.
Part of the reason that he coverage of the health issue has been so poor is that reporters, like many Democrats, are stuck in 1993. But the battles of 16 years ago aren’t as germane as Seeyle and others would think. Hillary Clinton was fighting for uninsured people against entrenched interests. Barack Obama is fighting for entrenched interests against populist objections.
“Over soothing piano music, the narrator in one commercial tells viewers that change would mean that they could not be denied coverage for pre-existing conditions or be dropped from their plans if they get sick, and that they could still make their own medical decisions, in consultation with their doctors.
‘So what does health insurance reform really mean?’ the narrator says. ‘Quality, affordable care you can count on.’
The commercials are running in Alaska, Arkansas, Colorado, Indiana, Louisiana, Maine, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, North Dakota, South Dakota and Virginia. They are aimed at bolstering moderate and conservative House Democrats who need some ammunition to counter the intense campaign against revamping the system. Another objective is to win over senators from swing states or whose votes are in play.”
New York Times — Obama Proposal to Create Medicare Panel Meets With Resistance
Back in the real world where what really matters is what kind of health bill can get through Congress, Writer Robert Pear examines the resistance to the president’s idea of taking Medicare cuts out of the hands of Congress and putting it into the hands of an unelected board whose decisions Congress would have to vote to block, not approve.
Lawmakers survived a round of Base Realignment And Closure recommendations a few years ago and are not eager to repeat the process with a program the effects every American over the age of 63.
It’s a proposal with obvious appeal to the technocratic president, but the Congressional Budget Office has said that even with huge new powers for the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission, savings would be meager. That means to get to serious savings needed to offset the costs of a national health plan even more power would have to be vested with the tiny agency, perhaps even making part of the executive branch.
After lawmakers get back from a long August with slipping approval ratings, broad public outrage, and already facing worries about 2010, ideas like Obama’s Medicare panel could prove to be deal breakers for liberals and conservatives.
Conservatives don’t like investing power over life or death decisions in the hands of unelected bureaucrats. Liberals don’t like to cut social spending.
“Lawmakers question whether the proposed new agency would be insulated from politics. They also say Congress should not delegate so much power to a group that is not politically accountable. In a letter to Speaker Nancy Pelosi last week, 75 House members from both parties and all parts of the country criticized Mr. Obama’s proposal and similar bills, saying they could threaten the ability of patients to get access to the care they need.
‘The idea that we should forfeit or outsource our constitutional responsibility over Medicare is ill-considered,’ said Representative Richard E. Neal, Democrat of Massachusetts.”
Los Angeles Times — Afghanistan report won’t include U.S. troop request, Gates says
The Afghan escalation remains the most under-covered story of the summer. Democrats are turning a blind eye to their president’s efforts and Republicans reflexively support military intervention, so there hasn’t been nearly the focus on the Afghan fight as their was when the situation was in a similar state of flux in Iraq.
Sen. Lindsey Graham warned recently of pulling a “Rumsfeld” in Afghanistan – refusing to acknowledge the size of the job. But that seems to be the direction Rumsfeld’s successor, Robert Gates, is heading, likely under pressure from the White House to escalate the war incrementally so as not to create blowback from liberals who should, by every intellectually honest standard, oppose the open-ended commitment and nation-building goals in Afghanistan.
Writer Paul Richter explains that the Pentagon brass wants another 30,000 troops but will instead deal in vague suggestions in the report due to Congress after the Afghan elections next week.
“Obama ordered 21,000 additional troops last spring to bring the U.S. force in Afghanistan to 68,000 by the end of this year. About 30,000 international troops under NATO command are also deployed in Afghanistan.
Some military officials believe that more troops are needed if the U.S. and its North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies are to succeed in rolling back Taliban advances and protecting Afghan civilians.
Gates, however, said he was concerned that additional forces could fuel anti-U.S. sentiments, and that providing new troops would be ‘a challenge,’ considering that U.S. forces are still stretched.
McChrystal is expected to call for an increasing focus on protecting the population and less on mounting individual attacks on suspected extremists.”
Peggy Noonan — From ‘Yes, We Can,’ to ‘No! Don’t!’
Like photos of the American political landscape taken from a U-2 spy plane, Peggy Noonan shows the problem of an administration that stokes partisan ardor instead of cooling it.
She finds a man who was good at rung for president is proving bad at actually doing the job.
“The president seemed like a man long celebrated as being very good at politics—the swift rise, the astute reading of a varied electorate—who is finding out day by day that he isn’t actually all that good at it. In this sense he does seem reminiscent of Jimmy Carter, who was brilliant at becoming president but not being president. (Actually a lot of them are like that these days.)
Also, something odd. When Mr. Obama stays above the fray, above the nitty-gritty of specifics, when he confines his comments on health care to broad terms, he more and more seems . . . pretty slippery. In the town hall he seemed aware of this, and he tried to be very specific about the need for this aspect of a plan, and the history behind that proposal. And yet he seemed even more slippery. When he took refuge in the small pieces of his argument, he lost the major threads; when he addressed the major threads, he seemed almost to be conceding that the specifics don’t hold.
When you seem slippery both in the abstract and the particular, you are in trouble.”
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