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White House Mystery: The Left Acts Like the Left

By Doug Bandow on 8.19.09 @ 9:06AM

The Obama administration says it didn't see it coming. Reports the Washington Post:

President Obama's advisers acknowledged Tuesday that they were unprepared for the intraparty rift that occurred over the fate of a proposed public health insurance program, a firestorm that has left the White House searching for a way to reclaim the initiative on the president's top legislative priority.

Administration officials insisted that they have not shied away from their support for a public option to compete with private insurance companies, an idea they said Obama still prefers to see in a final bill.

But at a time when the president had hoped to be selling middle-class voters on how insurance reforms would benefit them, the White House instead finds itself mired in a Democratic Party feud over an issue it never intended to spotlight.

"I don't understand why the left of the left has decided that this is their Waterloo," said a senior White House adviser, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "We've gotten to this point where health care on the left is determined by the breadth of the public option. I don't understand how that has become the measure of whether what we achieve is health-care reform."

"It's a mystifying thing," he added. "We're forgetting why we are in this."

The Left certainly isn't forgetting its objectives.

So much for the Revolution!

Tenn Slim| 8.19.09 @ 10:39AM

Opine
"I don't understand why the left of the left has decided that this is their Waterloo,":
If one follows the Left's history, this is classic. Failure to grasp the internal weaknesses of thier own structure. The Left is and always has been compartmentalized. The left hand is not supposed to know what the right hand is doing. If there truly was a hierarchieal leadership, IE: The Top Dog running the show, then none of this would occur. Instead, ALL Left Agencies, organizations, individual egos, individual power holders, have thier own angst driven agendas.
Example: The EPA would be control over water rights. An excellent article, summarised, ends up with no one having any water to drink, use or clear up. EPA reqs simply cross out any supposed gains or losses. A matrix ending up non -functional. Carry this to the OBNA Podesta run, Soros funded Progressive Media East Wing, and one can clearly see why the current fiasco occurred.
MAKE NO MISTAKE, the Left will muddle thru this. The Funders, the Netters, The Bloggers, the 13 million expectant Lefters out there, will drive OBNA right off the cliff. They will not be denied.
Semper Fi
end

John G.| 8.19.09 @ 10:40AM

If you listen to Kos, Howard Dean, Barney Frank, Pelosi, et al, people who most would consider the extreme left, the public option is not up for negotiation. To the hard left, the public option IS healthcare "reform".

The president has been pushing for a public option, as a means to destroy the private health insurance industry, for years now.

They are not giving up on this, they know the window is closing and their time is now. Conservatives should get complacent here.

TennesseeVolunteer| 8.19.09 @ 11:31AM

You have to remember one other thing. this administration will say anything to get their way. the problem is those on the Left actually listen to what they say. Conservatives already understand that this administration will say anything to make you think they agree with you while they fully intend to do whatever they want to once they get our votes etc.
The left is still listening to him so when he says the public option is a maybe, they believe him and go into apoplexy. we know it is a lie, so could care less. We've figured the administration out, the left who aren't in on the daily big lies told by this administration to get their way haven't.

JP| 8.19.09 @ 11:43AM

The WH advisors are either disingenuous, or they are completely incompetent. Heck, they allowed Pelosi and most leftwing members of the House Democratic Caucus to write the bill. For 6 months, the Far Left, Netroots, and MoveOn types had the explicit expectations that the Public Option was Central to ObamaCare. It would be if in 1981 President Reagan had dropped his demands for a reduction in the Capital Gains Tax rate, and then be shocked to see half of his party rebel.

The sad fact is, the problem is not necessairily with the advisors, but with the Man in the Oval Office. One does not set expectations so high by promising something that one considers negotiable. If the Public Option was ultimately negotiable in the first place, expectations should have been set accordingly. Personally, I think Obama was more interested in the glory of being the President who implemented Universal health Care, and took too little interest in the legislative fight until it was too late. He trusted Pelosi and Reed way too much, and he broke rule number 1 when implementing an agenda: never outsource the bill to Congress without first having your WH staff set the initial framework. Obama got away with outsourcing the Stimulus in this fashion, but the results of the Cap and Trade and HealthCare outsourcing are far less favorable,