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Getbig Main Boards => Politics and Political Issues Board => Topic started by: Soul Crusher on November 22, 2009, 07:53:04 AM
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President Obama has developed tin ear in reform debate
By Margery Eagan
Sunday, November 22, 2009 - Updated 3h ago
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The Senate moved forward on the $848 billion health-care bill this weekend. It wasn’t thanks to its chief cheerleader, Barack Obama, but in spite of him.
What a mess he’s made of the politics here.
He’s alienated both influential abortion-rights diva Kate Michelman on the left, and wacky Republican Congresswoman Michele Bachmann on the right. “We don’t know how far the government will go in this bureaucracy!” Bachmann said last week about a quasi-government panel’s new mammogram recommendations.
In the middle are American women thoroughly confused about those mammogram guidelines, the new Pap test guidelines, and whether their kids will ever get that elusive, Obama-promised swine flu vaccine - or spend the winter Purelling their palms into dried-up little prunes.
And predictably, health-care opponents went to town. “This is how rationing begins,” declared Tennessee Republican Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn.
We now have “a peek under the curtain,” said Alaska Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski, “of what we can anticipate with a government-run program.”
And who was reassuring us that they were wrong?
Call it a perfect storm for Obama-care.
Yet the Washington Post reported yesterday that the White House saw none of this coming, dismissing it as hysterical rhetoric that would not resonate with average Americans. The paper said Obamites knew about the U.S. Preventative Services Task Force mammogram recommendations since early October and knew they would be published Nov. 17. The task force even notified Obama’s Health and Human Services department.
OK, even if the president can’t tell a quasi-government task force what to do, can’t he or his envoys make discreet phone calls emphasizing the delicacy of the timing here? At the very least, could they not have trotted out Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to declare “ignore it all” before, not after, the dam burst?
Or maybe the president has hired only tin-eared political operatives.
That’s pretty depressing if you, like me, are still hopeful about Obama - despite plummeting poll numbers, his coddling of Wall Street, his Hamlet routine in Afghanistan and this latest debacle.
It’s even more depressing if you, like me, think a public option is needed to keep insurance costs from bankrupting us.
As it is, even the Obamites’ new slogan, “Yes We Can! We just haven’t yet!” has not been enough to lift my spirits this week.
It should be noted: The GOP health-care alternative does not appear to cover mammograms at all. So Bachmann, Blackburn and Murkowski are full of baloney.
But if there’s anything Obama should know by now it’s that policy debate in America is not about nuances, caveats or shades of gray. It’s either reduced to a 3-second slogan, or it’s drowned out. So, as of this moment, his health-care package is treading water, struggling to stay afloat.
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When he has pissed off liberal women like this, you know things are not going well.