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!
About the Author
Doug Bandow is a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute and the Senior Fellow in International Religious Persecution at the Institute on Religion and Public Policy. A former Special Assistant to President Ronald Reagan, he is author of Beyond Good Intentions: A Biblical View of Politics (Crossway).
