Apparently the President is serious about doubling down
Charles Lane recounts President Obama’s words to (soon to be ex-Senator) Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, which sound an awful lot like a lecture:
If the price of certainty is essentially for us to adopt the exact same proposals that were in place for eight years leading up to the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression — we don’t tinker with health care, let the insurance companies do what they want, we don’t put in place any insurance reforms, we don’t mess with the banks, let them keep on doing what they’re doing now because we don’t want to stir up Wall Street — the result is going to be the same. I don’t know why we would expect a different outcome pursuing the exact same policy that got us into this fix in the first place…
If our response ends up being, you know, because we don’t want to — we don’t want to stir things up here, we’re just going to do the same thing that was being done before, then I don’t know what differentiates us from the other guys. And I don’t know why people would say, boy, we really want to make sure that those Democrats are in Washington fighting for us.
Lanes’s reflections follow on Obama’s comments:
he cast Lincoln’s plea for a bit more centrism as a call for a return to Bushism — the “exact same proposals that were in place for the last eight years.” That’s not what she was advocating; it’s not what any Democrat who’s questioning his approach is advocating. But the president set up this strawman, and he pummeled it, rather than engaging Lincoln’s valid concerns.
The second striking thing was how easily he appeared to write off Lincoln politically. Conceding nothing, he implied that her defeat was not only a foregone conclusion, but also an acceptable price to pay for staying the course on policy. To be sure, maybe the whole thing was just kabuki — Lincoln standing up to the president for the benefit of the folks back home who don’t like him, and Obama obligingly playing his part. But it sure looked pretty spontaneous to me.
The Lincoln-Obama debate epitomized the left-vs.-center debate within the Democratic Party these days, which is much broader than health care, even though it is necessarily focused on that for the moment. The question is whether the party should cut its losses on comprehensive health reform, or keep pursuing it despite the political headwinds, on the grounds that even an initially unpopular bill would be easier to defend than no bill at all.
David Plouffe, back in the White House to direct post-Massachusetts political operations, favors nailing the party’s colors to the health-care mast.
If Democrats choose to interpret the results in Massachusetts as an endorsement of the President and an invitation to double down on healthcare, it’s just fine with us. (HT: Wretchard)