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Posts Tagged ‘Senate’

Obama 2007: Vote for Me over Hillary Because I Won’t Use Reconciliation on Health Care

Monday, March 8th, 2010

In 2007, Barack Obama argued that primary voters should support him because he would not use reconciliation on health care reform, but Hillary Clinton is.

A little-known interview in 2007 by Barack Obama supplies some fresh evidence of President Barack Obama’s shifting views on the use of reconciliation to pass comprehensive health care reform. Now, in 2010, the Obama Administration and Congressional Democrats have settled upon a plan to pass Obamacare via the use of reconciliation in the Senate after a majority vote in the House. Back in 2007, candidate Obama actually used the issue of the use of reconciliation on health care reform as an example of what Hillary Clinton would do but Obama would not, concluding that folks should vote for Obama for this reason:

Obama was talking about the differences between himself and his then-opponent in the Democratic primary, Hillary Clinton.

I think it is legitimate at this point for me to explain very clearly to the American people why I think I will be a better president than Hillary Clinton, and to draw contrasts,” Obama said.

“But that’s very different from this sort of slash-and-burn politics that I think we’ve become accustomed to. Look, part of the reason I’m running is not just to be president, it’s to get things done. And what I believe that means is we’ve got to break out of what I call, sort of, the 50-plus-one pattern of presidential politics. Which is, you have nasty primaries where everybody’s disheartened. Then you divide the country 45 percent on one side, 45 percent on the other, 10 percent in the middle — all of them apparently live in Florida and Ohio — and battle it out. And maybe you eke out a victory of 50-plus-one, but you can’t govern. I mean, you get Air Force One, there are a lot of nice perks to being president, but you can’t deliver on health care. We’re not going to pass universal health care with a 50-plus-one strategy. We’re not going to have a serious bold energy policy of the sort I proposed yesterday unless you build a working majority. And part of the task of building that working majority is to get people to believe in our government, that it can work, that it’s based on common sense, that it’s not just sort of scoring political points.

The interviewer then asked, “So is your answer to ‘Why I will be a better president than Hillary Clinton,’ is your answer that she’ll be a 50-plus-one president and you won’t?”

“Yes,” Obama said.

Even left-leaning Polifact, who collected the above Obama quotes in the wake of Glenn Beck’s partial airing of them last week, states that Obama has committed a complete flip flop on the use of reconciliation:

Obama may argue that he has tried to include Republicans, but that they have simply been unwilling to play ball. He also has noted that the first iteration of the health care bill passed the Senate with a supermajority. But the fact is, the health care bill is not getting any Republican support, and Obama is pressing forward with a plan to push through a health care plan without them, and without a 60-vote majority.

And we think the last quote, from 2005, is even more on point. Yes, Obama was speaking about the “nuclear option” as it related to judicial nominees, and not a reconciliation bill. But the principles are largely the same, especially as Obama noted that having simple “majoritarian” power in the Senate is “just not what the Founders intended.” And we think that’s enough to warrant a Full Flop.

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Mainstream Media Consensus on Health Care Summit: Tie Goes to the GOP

Thursday, February 25th, 2010

President Barack Obama Had a Tough Day Today at his Health Care Summit as the GOP had the "best day they've had in years"

The same journalists who cheered Candidate Barack Obama on to victory in 2008 and engaged in mainly fawning coverage of the Obama Presidency in 2009 tonight appear to be turning on their hero, declaring that today’s summit was either a win for the the GOP or at best for Obama it was a tie, and a tie goes to the GOP because Obama needed a big win to build momentum for the monumental task ahead of pushing Obamacare through the House and Senate once again. Politico’s Obama-loving writer Glenn Thrush outlines the building media narrative:

Seven thick hours of substantive policy discussion, preening and low-grade political clashes had Hill staffers nodding at their desks, policy mavens buzzing — and participants declaring the marathon C-SPAN-broadcast session a draw.

But in this case, the tie goes to Republicans, according to operatives on both sides of the aisle — because the stakes were so much higher for Democrats trying to build their case for ramming reform through using a 51-vote reconciliation tactic.

“I think it was a draw, which was a Republican win,” said Democratic political consultant Dan Gerstein. “The Republican tone was just right: a respectful, substantive disagreement, very disciplined and consistent in their message.”

The White House and Hill Democrats had hoped congressional Republicans would prove themselves to be unruly, unreasonable and incapable of a serious policy discussion — “the face of gridlock,” as one Democrat put it hours before the summit.

Obama clearly failed to gain a clear advantage over the GOP, like he did a few weeks ago at the House Republican retreat in Baltimore. Thrush also notes that the Democrats tended to talk about stories they’ve heard on the campaign trail about health experiences, as opposed to actually defending the legislation they were there to discuss:

Obama wasn’t able to dominate them like he did last month during an encounter with House Republicans in Baltimore, when he delivered zingers high above the GOP from a conference room podium.

All of this makes it tougher — though not impossible — for Democrats to make the case that they need to abandon talks with the GOP and immediately proceed with a plan to ram health reform through the Senate using a 50-vote reconciliation tactic.

“He didn’t create the predicate for passing this through reconciliation,” said a senior Senate GOP staffer.

That’s not to say the gathering of 40 House and Senate members wasn’t a shaggy, bumptious, sometimes testy affair. Democrats were less eager to discuss legislative process than present case stories of constituents denied coverage by health insurers — often without explaining how their own bill would benefit those people.

Chris Cilizza of the Washington Post, also a well-known Obama sycophant, managed to rationalize the naming of Obama as his #2 winner on his winners/losers list, despite the fact that the entire Obama strategy, to make the GOP look clueless and obstructive so as to justify the use of reconciliation, completely failed today. Of course, Cilizza did not address the overall strategy coming into the summit nor the effect of the summit on that strategy in his article, instead choosing a simplistic winners/losers formula so as to avoid what he must know is the truth – today was a very bad day for President Barack Obama. Indeed, Cilizza seemed more interested in whether CSPAN or the cable networks “won” today than the effect of the summit on Obamacare’s chances of passage.

Across the cable and network dial, and in the new media on the internet, even strongly left-leaning folks admitted that today was a total bust for the Obama Reconciliation Strategy and a veritable disaster for the Democrats who are facing reelection in 2010. For instance, leftist John Dickerson at Slate, while also in denial regarding the disaster today was for his hero Obama personally, admits in his writing that the GOP looked very good and fence-sitting Democrats facing the 2010 electoral buzzsaw saw nothing that would encourage them to jump off the cliff with Obama on Obamacare:

Republicans came out ahead for the same reason: They did not look like hell-bent obstructionists….

This is why it wasn’t a good day for congressional Democrats. According to strategists involved in 2010 races, fence-sitting Democrats needed to see Obama change the political dynamic. He needed to show how health care reform could be defended and how Republicans could be brought low. He did neither. White House aides and the president himself said he was going to press Republicans for how their plans would work, but he did that only twice—and mildly. There was no put-up-or-shut-up moment.

Yet another Obama-worshipping journalist, Marc Ambinder, again couldn’t bring himself to admit the GOP beat Obama today – instead also calling the summit a tie, and adding that “that’s good news for the GOP” in his report for CBS News:

The political world watched the proceedings at Blair House looking for theatre: instead, a policy fight broke out. This time, both sides came armored, and there was no referee. It was a wash — and the tie goes to the Republicans.

The key question on the table was not whether Democrats and Republicans could come up with ways to compromise; it was whether the White House could move public opinion in a way that helps Nancy Pelosi get the votes she needs to pass the Senate bill in the House. That’s unlikely.

All told, the old halcyon days of “Hope and Change” in 2008, when “journalists” like Thrush, Ambinder, Cilizza and Dickerson could freely cheer lead for their hero Obama without any concern about appearing in the tank for Obama because the entire media was providing Obama with unerringly positive coverage at that time, are gone. Now, with Obama on year two and his signature initiative Obamacare on life support, these Obama sycophants are now being forced to admit that the momentum behind Obama’s agenda has completely collapsed. The failure of Obama to produce a GOP “gotcha” moment for his crew of “journalist” sycophants to write about tonight, combined with the steady and professional GOP performance, could be the death blow to the “last best chance” to pass Obamacare via reconciliation. An objective journalist would be outlining those possibilities in their piece tonight, it is unfortunate the American media is so enamored with Obama and the Democratic establishment that they have to be pulled kicking and screaming by indisputable facts, such as the GOP’s clear win in today’s summit, into reporting anything even approaching the facts on the ground.

Other, less biased, mainstream media sources stated with absolute clarity that today was an indisputable victory for the GOP, not least of which was CNN’s centrist analyst David Gergen, who blunted declared that for the GOP, this was “the best day they’ve had in years.” Gergen went on to explain that the GOP got tons of airtime today to show the public they have solutions in health care and are not obstructionist, perhaps undercutting the Democratic talking point of “Party of No” to some degree. Somehow even James Carville managed to praise the performance of GOP Senators today, and Politico also chimed in on the afternoon session by noting that “by the afternoon, however, both sides took a more substantive approach that played to the Republicans’ benefit, given Democratic attempts to portray them as unreasonable and partisan.”

While we quoted Gergen extensively already, this David Gergen quote from the halftime proceedings perhaps best sums up the total disaster today was for Obama and the Democrats:

CNN’s DAVID GERGEN: “The folks in the White House just must be kicking themselves right now. They thought that coming out of Baltimore when the President went in and was mesmerizing and commanding in front of the House Republicans that he could do that again here today. That would revive health care and would change the public opinion about their health care bill and they can go on to victory. Just the opposite has happened.” (CNN’s “Live,” 2/25/10)

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CBO: Obama’s Health Care Plan Too Sketchy to Score; UPDATE: Obama Punts on Public Option: “That’s Up To Leader Reid”

Monday, February 22nd, 2010

Obama Releases an 11 Page Health Care Plan the CBO Cannot Score

In the wake of this morning’s thunderous 11 pages of vague and somewhat contradictory bullet points from the Obama Administration as the latest iteration of Obamacare, the CBO makes the ironic point that Obama’s plan is too vague to score with any degree of accuracy regarding the 10 year cost of the plan. CBO Director Douglass Elmendorf, who was elevated to his position by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, makes this point as delicately as possible on the Director’s Blog:

This morning the Obama Administration released a description of its health care proposal, and CBO has already received several requests to provide a cost estimate for that proposal. We had not previously received the proposal, and we have just begun the process of reviewing it—a process that will take some time, given the complexity of the issues involved. Although the proposal reflects many elements that were included in the health care bills passed by the House and the Senate last year, it modifies many of those elements and also includes new ones. Moreover, preparing a cost estimate requires very detailed specifications of numerous provisions, and the materials that were released this morning do not provide sufficient detail on all of the provisions. Therefore, CBO cannot provide a cost estimate for the proposal without additional detail, and, even if such detail were provided, analyzing the proposal would be a time-consuming process that could not be completed this week.

So the CBO would need the Obama Administration to actually provide “very detailed specifications” of their provisions to score the bill, as opposed to the eleven pages of bullet points with underlined or bold faced (and probably poll-tested) phrases (such as affordable or greater accountability or Improve Individual Responsibility). Indeed, the only real changes, even by the White House’s own talking points, involve only reversing prior, unpopular backroom deals cut by Obama and special interest groups (unions) or specific senators (Ben Nelson (D-NE), the insertion of price controls into the legislation, and a claim that “Republican” ideas are driving the Medicare cuts. Politico’s Ben Smith reports:

The White House, in talking points circulated to allies on the Hill, points to three major differences between Obama’s proposal and the Senate health care bill:

In particular this proposal makes three specific changes to the bill passed by the Senate:

• It eliminates several “special deals” including the arrangement made for Nebraska;

• It includes a series of measures proposed by Republicans to eliminate waste, fraud and abuse;

• It includes a new provision to prevent arbitrary rate hikes like the recent 39 percent increase in California.

The reversal of the odious Cornhusker Kickback and the deal with the unions over the cadillac tax are good steps to reverse prior mistakes, but are not substantive progress towards a more centrist health care reform plan. Indeed, the CBO will not have a price for Obama’s “new” plan by the time of the great health care summit Thursday as planned and by now undoubtedly fully scripted by the Obama Administration. The reason the CBO will not have a score is that Obama’s plan lacks the specifications needed to score a proposal, and even if those specifications were provided, the CBO cannot score a bill in that short a period of time. The Obama Administration obviously knew of this inability of the CBO to score its proposal before it was released, as we know the Administration has hired the best health care economists in America to work on its scoring of the various iterations of Obamacare (remember Jonathan Gruber?). Accordingly, it must be Obama’s intent to head into the health care summit he created blind regarding the cost of his bill according to the CBO. Obviously, the CBO’s scoring will play a critical role in any serious negotiations between the GOP and Obama over a health care bill.

A conclusion from the above-outlined CBO issue and the explicit statements regarding reconciliation by Obama’s communications people this morning when releasing their 11 page bullet point summary could be that Obama is not serious about entering substantive negotiations with the GOP and is instead, again, rushing the process. As noted by the NYT back on February 7, 2010 when Obama first floated the idea of a health care summit with the GOP, it appears that in the absence of an attempt at real consensus, this week’s meeting with the GOP will “serve only to allow Democrats to frame a political argument against the Republicans going into the midterm campaign.”

UPDATE: Regarding the politically charged issue of the inclusion of the public option in the Obama Plan, the Obama Administration omitted any reference to same in today’s 11 pages and via spokesman Robert Gibbs stated “Thats up to Leader Reid”:

The White House says it’s up to Harry Reid whether the Senate votes on the public option.

Twenty senators have signed a letter asking for a vote on the public option through reconciliation, which would allow Democrats to pass legislation with just 51 votes.

White House press secretary Robert Gates said today that the White House will leave that up to the Senate Majority Leader.

“I think they’ve asked for a vote on the floor of the Senate, and that’s certainly up to those who manage those amendments and up to Leader Reid,” Gibbs said.

President Obama did not include a public option in the new healthcare plan he unveiled this morning, which builds on the Senate bill.

Gibbs suggested it was left out because it lacks support, saying the president is looking for “the best way forward into something that can ultimate wind its way through Congress.”

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