Tag: waterloo

Obama retreats from fight on ‘public option.’

I wonder what else he’s planning to give up?

Aides to President Barack Obama are putting the final touches on a new strategy to help Democrats recover from a brutal August recess by specifying what Obama wants to see in a compromise health care deal and directly confronting other trouble spots, West Wing officials tell POLITICO.

Obama is considering detailing his health-care demands in a major speech as soon as next week, when Congress returns from the August recess. And although House leaders have said their members will demand the inclusion of a public insurance option, Obama has no plans to insist on it himself, the officials said.

“We’re entering a new season,” senior adviser David Axelrod said in a telephone interview. “It’s time to synthesize and harmonize these strands and get this done. We’re confident that we can do that. But obviously it is a different phase. We’re going to approach it in a different way. The president is going to be very active.”

(H/T: Drudge) I look forward to seeing whatever plan the President’s committee of aides put together for him to push on Congress, of course. It’ll almost certainly be a platitudinous, amorphous piece of stitched-together fluff that will satisfy nobody and lecture everyone on the planet – at least, based on past experience – but at least we’ll finally have gotten the White House to actually think about and discuss what changes in health care policy the executive branch would like to see. Letting the liberal Democratic leadership in Congress do it for the President was a serious error: it’s about time that he puts his personal stamp on an actual, ‘official’ plan. In other words: it’s nice that the administration is finally taking health care reform seriously, and we look forward to seeing its tentative plan.

After we hack out all the bits of said plan that are just stupid, of course.  And make sure that various concessions are made.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

Now it’s the *administration* who’s using the term ‘Waterloo.’

Non-ironically, to boot.

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.”

Bolding mine, and via Patterico’s Pontifications, who is laughing as hard over this as I am. Please also note that being for a public option is now being seen as being a non-mainstream position by the White House culture itself: the tone-deafness exhibited there is staggering, particularly since it was guaranteed that the WaPo would run with that.  Which suggests one of two alternatives: either the White House is going to drop the public option, or the White House has precisely zero message discipline.

Or both, I suppose.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.