Florida GOP Chairman Jim Greer, who played a key role mobilizing hysteria about the president’s first day of school speech, explains why the advance-release text of the president’s actual speech turns out to be so mainstream and unexceptional: Obama scrapped the indoctrination speech after Greer and Co. raised the alarm.
Let the brainwashing begin! Obama’s otherwise unremarkable speech to the nation’s schoolchildren begins at noon ET. That and the day’s other political news in the TPMDC Morning Roundup.
The last 8 weeks has demonstrated nothing more clearly than the fact that in politics as in most other things nothing is won on defense. The fact impressed itself on me again when I saw this opinion column by Reps. Shadegg and Hoekstra (R) in the Wall Street Journal. Piece through the rhetoric and the essential message is true to what the Republican leadership believes about health care and health insurance policy.
In short, the problem isn’t that your insurance costs too much or that you might lose it or anything like that. The problem is that you have insurance, especially insurance through your employer. Ideally you wouldn’t have insurance at all or at least you’d have much less of it. Read More
There’s a lot of storm and confusion right now. And no one’s going to put their cards on the table until after Obama speaks. But the biggest tell I’ve seen over the last few days was Ben Nelson’s announcement yesterday that he’ll support a ‘triggered’ public option.
The question for the White House right now isn’t what’s ideal from a political or policy standpoint. It’s finding some way to thread this needle. Because at this point, most of the pathways on the right and the left of this question seem firmly blocked. And this is the one, maybe the only one, that might not be.
We’ll have more on this later today.
A reader chimes in …
You ask: “Am I the only one who thinks that if the Dems pass a bill with mandates and subsidies for poor and moderate income people to purchase it but no public option or competition with the insurers, that it will be pretty much a catastrophe for the Democrats in political terms?”
Actually, I think you have that precisely backwards. In political terms, such a bill would be a tremendous boost for the Democratic Party.
Rep. Charles Boustany (R-LA), a physician who will give the GOP response to Obama’s joint address to Congress tomorrow on health care, has actually co-sponsored with Democrats what some in his party would call “pro-death panel” legislation and has conceded that the Sarah Palin-inspired death panel freak-out “got really out of hand.”
Are you kidding? Says TPM Reader JB, in so many words …
I just read “Do I Have the Politics Wrong?” on your web site. I am always appalled at the idea of paying subsidies to the poor and moderate income people so they can buy private insurance policies.
The people supporting the subsidy concept seem to have no idea how expensive private policies are! Perhaps they have good coverage from their employers and they’ve never researched the cost of private health insurance plans.
I’ve just been reading Jon Cohn’s piece in TNR about where health care reform stands post-August. And he’s surprisingly optimistic. I also think he makes a good argument. And there’s no one I can think of who I trust more when it comes to helping me understand the real world implications of health care policy issues and reforms than Cohn.
The issue Cohn zeroes in on, the person who appears to be the fulcrum of the debate right now, is Sen. Snowe (R) of Maine — the one Republican who, despite not having the same take as liberals on the ideal reform, still seems to be negotiating in good faith, i.e., unlike the gamers Enzi and Grassley, who are Senatorial Lucys trying to kill any possible legislation, she’s actually trying to pass something, even if it’s something that many would see as falling far short. This is also why I think Nelson’s statement yesterday on a ‘trigger’ is key to understanding where this is going.
As one source told Cohn, the real question on the Snowe path to a bill is whether you could end up with Snowe but without a handful of conservative Dems. That loses you 60 votes, though it does still give you a nominally bipartisan bill — which is a big deal for a lot of Senate moderates whether you think it makes any sense or not.
It’s certainly true that you could get Nelson and lose, say … Lincoln or Landrieu or even a few others. Lincoln’s the one looking at a very tough reelection fight. But I think there’s a reason why Nelson is routinely and rightly seen as the outermost rightward limit of the Democratic caucus in the senate. I suspect his apparent willingness to sign on means the rest of the Dems in the senate will too.
Remembering the right-wing performance art that was the August health care townhall craziness, here’s a contender for one of the ‘best’ moments, when a high-strung tea-bag activist dares Rep. Norm Dicks (D-WA) to come down from the stage and forcibly take a $20 bill from her hand — as a demonstration of his willingness to confiscate citizens’ money to give to bureaucrats.