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Obama Schools Republicans on the Box In Which They Put Themselves (Video)

Jan 30th, 2010
by Tom.
2 comments

Re: Obama Goes To GOP Lions’ Den — And Mauls The Lions, Sam Stein, Huffington Post, 01/29/10

President Obama traveled to a House Republican retreat in Baltimore on Friday and delivered a performance that was at once defiant, substantive and engaging.

Somehow, Obama knew beforehand that he could win the arguments that these Republicans are hurling at him in the media most everyday, arguments like, “The Republicans have a health care plan, but Pelosi ignored it,” and “Our health care plan would insure all Americans at half the cost.” He went in to the Q & A confidently. Obama took on the worst and most vitriolic talking points that the right could throw at him and volleyed back with clear and concise logic and fact. President Obama did more than that, he went to the heart of the tea bagger talking points that have Republican constituencies in such an uproar and shined a bright light of truth on them. You can read the entire transcript of the question and answer session here.

The President was asked by US Representative Jason Chaffetz (R) UT-3:

CONGRESSMAN CHAFFETZ: And I appreciate you being here.

I’m one of 22 House freshmen. We didn’t create this mess, but we are here to help clean it up. You talked a lot about this deficit of trust. There’s some things that have happened that I would appreciate your perspective on, because I can look you in the eye and tell you we have not been obstructionists. Democrats have the House and Senate and the presidency. And when you stood up before the American people multiple times and said you would broadcast the health care debates on C-SPAN, you didn’t. And I was disappointed, and I think a lot of Americans were disappointed.

You said you weren’t going to allow lobbyists in the senior-most positions within your administration, and yet you did. I applauded you when you said it — and disappointed when you didn’t.

You said you’d go line by line through the health care debate — or through the health care bill. And there were six of us, including Dr. Phil Roe, who sent you a letter and said, “We would like to take you up on the offer; we’d like to come.” We never heard a letter, we never got a call. We were never involved in any of those discussions.

And when you said in the House of Representatives that you were going to tackle earmarks — in fact, you didn’t want to have any earmarks in any of your bills — I jumped up out of my seat and applauded you. But it didn’t happen.

More importantly, I want to talk about moving forward, but if we could address –

The President explained to the Congressman that over the course of the health care debate most of it was actually on CSPAN. There were so many committees that it was impossible to cover them all live because of logistical difficulties. The best part comes toward the end of his answer when be skillfully pivots and begins addressing the vitriolic health care talking points that have been repeated by the right wing fringe from tea baggers to FOX Entertainment. (I refuse to call it news.) It was here that President Obama explained to the GOP audience the fact that they have boxed themselves in by working up their constituents in such an anti-Obama fervor, than any attempt by them to sit down with him for any meaningful discussion would be treated like treason to the party.

So all I’m saying is, we’ve got to close the gap a little bit between the rhetoric and the reality. I’m not suggesting that we’re going to agree on everything, whether it’s on health care or energy or what have you, but if the way these issues are being presented by the Republicans is that this is some wild-eyed plot to impose huge government in every aspect of our lives, what happens is you guys then don’t have a lot of room to negotiate with me.

I mean, the fact of the matter is, is that many of you, if you voted with the administration on something, are politically vulnerable in your own base, in your own party. You’ve given yourselves very little room to work in a bipartisan fashion because what you’ve been telling your constituents is, this guy is doing all kinds of crazy stuff that’s going to destroy America.

And I would just say that we have to think about tone. It’s not just on your side, by the way — it’s on our side, as well. This is part of what’s happened in our politics, where we demonize the other side so much that when it comes to actually getting things done, it becomes tough to do.

Now, the next step is for President Obama to attend a gathering of the Progressive Caucus and take their questions in the same manner. They throw as much vitriol at Obama as does his political opponents. The left attack Obama just as much as the right. The far left radicalize nuclear power, gay rights, Obama’s economic team, and a host of other issues. He must confront them next.

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

Oct 25th, 2009
by Tom.
1 comment

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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A Second Look | Obama To GOP: You Have To Start Meeting Me Halfway

Apr 30th, 2009
by Tom.
No comments yet

via Obama To GOP: You Have To Start Meeting Me Halfway.

One hundred days into office, Barack Obama’s list of accomplishments is certainly immense. From the budget, passed by the Senate on Wednesday night, to a stimulus package, the current administration has put in place an economic framework that will shape domestic policy for decades to come. Those achievement, however, have come at a cost to another tenet of the Obama agenda: the dawning of a bipartisan age.

I would not go as far to say that bipartisanship is a “tenet” of the Obama agenda up there with health care, but rather something missing in government that his vision included. He campaigned on bringing change to Washington, and he has accomplished that in the first 100 days even after getting out in front of train loads of problems that would turn anyone prematurely gray. The recovery act alone should have been enough of an accomplishment in this short time, but Obama is drawing fire for not healing the political divide in Washington in only 100 days when he actually tried to move heaven and earth to get Republicans to the table.

Although the stimulus passed with only three Republican Senators (Arlan Spector revealed that maybe more would have voted for it had they not feared a challenge from the right in their home states) and zero Republican House members voting for it, the country knows that the spending stimulus was needed and that the republican leadership was trying to play politics with the conservative voters’  livelihoods, and their unemployment checks, and their kids’ education.

The Republicans put out talking points that the stimulus bill was another example of the Democratic Party’s over spending without offering any ideas of their own besides tax cuts.  The Republicans did not embrace the tax cut provisions that were in the stimulus because those cuts would not have been the huge give-away to the rich that they wanted. Who cares about tax cuts for working folks, right?

Republican Governors want the stimulus funds, the Republican voting poor want and need the funds, but the Republicans in Congress want to swim against the stream because Ronald Reagan and the bug crap crazy, nut-job, bottom-feeding, hate spewing, xenophobic, homophobic, rabid “kill him”, trickle-down believing crowd that has become the Republican Party is all about anything anti-Obama. The media chimed in with the right-wing, as usual, appealing to the Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber lovers and repeated that the stimulus was way too big without doing a moments worth of mathematics or checking the polls to see where the majority stood.

The Democrats in Congress passed a stimulus that was actually too small, but to hear the right-wing media talk it was “massive”. As Media Matters notes, during the run-up to the vote on the stimulus:

Indeed, The Washington Post reported on February 17, “[A]s big as it is, the final bill is smaller than what initially passed in the House and Senate, and it falls well short of filling the $2 trillion gap in demand that many economists foresee.” Economist Mark Zandi wrote in an op-ed on February 15, “[M]y most significant criticism of the current stimulus plan is that it is too small.” He added: “Our struggling economy will produce nearly $1 trillion less than it is capable of this year and will underperform again by at least as much in 2010. The $789 billion in spending and tax cuts to be distributed over those two years is not going to fill this expected hole in the economy. I would thus not be surprised if policymakers are forced to consider a second stimulus plan soon.” (Zandi added, “Nonetheless, when combined with other aggressive policy steps, including efforts to shore up the financial system and stem foreclosures, this fiscal-stimulus plan will go a long way toward relieving the current economic crisis.”) Zandi was not alone. Other economists — including Paul Krugman, Dean Baker, James Galbraith, Eileen Appelbaum, and J. Bradford DeLong — also assessed the stimulus package as too small.

The stimulus that is too small but yet somehow, vaguely, too big at the same time is a shining example of how the GOP is not only not meeting Obama halfway, but they aren’t even walking toward each other. Obama wants to do the right thing, the right-wing wants to do in Obama. They aren’t on the same planet, let alone trying to meet.

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