Obama: ‘I Will Take My Lumps’

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President Obama did not stray much from prepared remarks we wrote up earlier during his town hall in Ohio on jobs, but assumed a mocking tone when addressing health care and saying it “has been in the news a little bit this week.”

Obama said he knows people are “in a tizzy” because “this process was so long and so drawn out … this is just what happens in Congress, it’s just an ugly process.”

He portrayed himself as fighting the ways of Washington, suggesting that special interests and lobbyists had slowed down the bill.

He said people are asking if he is “weakened” on health care and “How’s he going to survive this?”

Obama said he didn’t take up health care to do well in the polls. “The way to boost your poll numbers is not to do anything,” he said. “I’m not going to walk away just because it’s hard. We’re going to keep on working to get this done.”

“I will take my lumps” on health care, Obama said, given how important he finds the issue.

It was Obama’s first campaign-style event in several months, and he was enjoying the crowd. He even offered his standard “I love you back” when someone in the audience professed love for him.

“The single hardest thing about being president is getting out of the bubble,” Obama said.

Also in a bit of message disconnect, Obama said he was urged not to avoid health care because people told him “you’ve got a lot on your plate.” This comes one day after White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs noted that Congress can to afford to let the “dust settle” on health care since Obama “has a very full plate,” adding, “There’s plenty of work for the president to do in the meantime.”

Late Update: Obama received, surprisingly, no questions about health care during the town hall meeting.

Undoubtedly Obama was prepared for the topic, and returned to it at the close of the town hall.

“The process has been less than pretty. When you deal with 535 members of Congress, it’s going to be a somewhat ugly process, not necessarily because any individual member of Congress is trying to do something wrong,” he said. “When you put it all together it starts looking like it was just this monstrosity and it makes people fearful … or think that it will cost [them] tax dollars … or I already have insurance so why should I support this.”

“These are things that have to get done, this is our best chance to do it,” he said. “We can’t keep on putting this off. … None of the big issues we face in this country are simple. They are complicated. The health care system is a big complicated system and doing it right is hard.”

Here’s the video:

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