Clueless: Anonymous Says Senate Pushes For Public Option Without Obama’s Support

via Leaderless: Senate Pushes For Public Option Without Obama’s Support

President Barack Obama is actively discouraging Senate Democrats in their effort to include a public insurance option with a state opt-out clause as part of health care reform. In its place, say multiple Democratic sources, Obama has indicated a preference for an alternative policy, favored by the insurance industry, which would see a public plan “triggered” into effect in the future by a failure of the industry to meet certain benchmarks.

This opening paragraph is unofficial conjecture and based on hearsay from sources either unwilling to go on the record about it, or fictional.

The administration retreat runs counter to the letter and the spirit of Obama’s presidential campaign.

Opinion. And anger.

“The leadership understands that pushing for a public option is a somewhat risky strategy, but we may be within striking distance. A signal from the president could be enough to put us over the top,” said one Senate Democratic leadership aide. Such pleading is exceedingly rare on Capitol Hill and comes only after Senate leaders exhausted every effort to encourage Obama to engage.

The sentence that begins with “Such pleading is exceedingly rare” is quite possibly changing the context of the quote from the anonymous “one Senate Democratic leadership aide”. The sentence is craftily joined onto this quote to make the reader think the person being quoted meant something entirely different than what he/she said. Is the statement by the anonymous person fact or opinion?

How do we know that “Senate leaders exhausted every effort to encourage Obama to engage”? The authors fail to tell us who has “pleaded” with Obama and who has simply suggested something to him.

This whole article is bent toward some sort of chastisement of the administration’s perceived lack of leadership, when the truth is Obama has gotten much done in his first year especially considering the condition of the economy when he took control.

Look, we all want a strong public option but we have to remember where all this would be if November 2008 had turned out differently, and then count or blessings we have gotten this far.

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via Leaderless: Senate Pushes For Public Option Without Obama’s Support

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