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Go Home "The Public Option Debate All Over Again"

JONATHAN COHN DECEMBER 7, 2010

"The Public Option Debate All Over Again"

BY JONATHAN BERNSTEIN

Fascinating press conference today from Barack Obama. His comments at the end about purists were, from my perspective, absolutely correct, substantively. 

The truth is that there are a lot of people who just don't accept that the President of the United States can want something, fight for it, fight effectively and correctly, and still not get it. If it doesn't happen, it must have been—in Obama's words—a "betrayal." Those people are wrong.

And yet it's awful hard to believe that calling people out on it—his allies, the activists within the Democratic party--will do him any good.

One can never tell, with politicians, what's "real" and what's for show, but his answer sure sounded like a lot of frustration coming through in a way that won't help him with the rest of the nation, but really will cause trouble with people he needs support from. Perhaps it was what polling and focus groups say people want to hear, but my money is on frustration.

All in all, one of the more interesting presidential press conferences. It's good to see that the format can still work.

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8 comments

I saw some of the press conference. When I heard him take swipes at the progressive/liberal wing I just shook my head. He took some good swipes at the GOP but we were begging him to do that before any negotiations with the publicants. It may not have worked in the end but at least try it. A bit of up-front confrontation won't hurt.

- tnmats

December 7, 2010 at 4:26pm

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Obama understands what lefties don't -- if taxes go up for middle-class or working-class Americans, he's going to be reflexively blamed for it even if the Republicans gamed the system. The average voter just doesn't pay enough attention to the political process to notice who caused the taxes to go up -- he or she only knows they went up on this President's watch. That is not somewhere that Obama wanted to go just to cheer up Bernie Sanders and Ed Schultz.

- wildboy

December 7, 2010 at 4:51pm

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"And yet it's awful hard to believe that calling people out on it—his allies, the activists within the Democratic party--will do him any good." After listening to the press conference this afternoon a co-worker of mine went from calling for Obama's head to just grumbling about the deal. That's probably the most he can hope for.

- Attrill

December 7, 2010 at 5:15pm

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"The truth is that there are a lot of people who just don't accept that the President of the United States can want something, fight for it, fight effectively and correctly, and still not get it." Funny, but I completely missed the fight, effective, ineffective, correct, or incorrect. What I saw as the president telling the opposition it would get what it wanted before the negotiations even began. This is but another instance of bad tactics, the bad tactic of letting bank investors walk away unscathed because we had to rescue the banks as institutions (contrary to what was done to auto investors), the bad tactic of letting Republicans control the HCR debate in search of non-existent Republican votes, and now the bad tactic of negotiating with himself.

- roidubouloi

December 7, 2010 at 6:30pm

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Bernstein, I agree with your premise that people don't realize the presidency is not an all-powerful office, but Roid is completely correct: there was no (visible) fight to speak of, and Obama was giving off defeatist signals at a time the Republicans (i.e. Boehner) saw themselves as having the weaker hand. It's hard to appreciate Obama's noble defeat when he didn't, you know, actually try for the win. At all. Despite what he campaigned on.

- Curran1

December 8, 2010 at 1:04am

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What Wildboy said.

- basman

December 8, 2010 at 1:28am

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I really did not like Obama's tactics of the federal pay freeze before the "bipartisan" summit meeting. He was stuck up on the first meeting, so he decided that he needed to show he was serious by attacking his own base-federal employee unions who doled out massive amounts of money on Democrats behalf in a losing election. So he wasn't going to fight to get to the table, he was going to give some things up to get to the table. In all, Republicans are horrible. That's what this whole scenario played out. But the superrich are liberal as well. Maybe they'll put some of the tax break money to good use.

- RedState

December 8, 2010 at 2:10pm

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I agree with wildboy too. Democrats can't hope to win if they are the party of castor oil and Republicans the party of party till you drop. The Democrats simply can't risk the Republicans destroying America in 2012, if that means giving them half a loaf for 2 years, so be it because so much of the economy is based on faith, raise taxes now and lord knows what that can do to confidence. When the economy is back to 5 to 6% unemployment, then lets tackle the debt.

- blackton

December 8, 2010 at 4:22pm

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