When you’re Barack Obama and you’ve lost Jon Stewart, you’ve got a problem.
“Mr. President,” the “Daily Show” host said Monday night, “I can’t tell if you’re a Jedi — 10 steps ahead of everything — or if this whole health-care thing is kickin’ your [rear.]”
White House officials, by acknowledging that a public option (or government plan) is not essential to achieving health care reform, may have improved their chances of ultimately getting a bill.
In the meantime, though, they have touched off the most ferocious backlash among liberal talking heads since President Obama took office.
The president and his team insist they focus on big, long-term goals — and don’t obsess about cable chatter or newspaper chin-stroking. If they did, they’d be worried to watch reliable allies turn on them in the midst of battle.
In The New York Times, columnist Bob Herbert scolded the president under the withering headline, “This Is Reform? Why the insurers and the drug industry are smiling”: “[I]f we manage to get health care ‘reform’ this time around it will be the kind of reform that benefits the very people who have given us a failed system, and thus made reform so necessary. … If the oldest and sickest are on Medicare, and the poorest are on Medicaid, and the young and the healthy are required to purchase private insurance without the option of a competing government-run plan — well, that’s reform the insurance companies can believe in. … If the drug companies and the insurance industry are smiling, it can only mean that the public interest is being left behind.”
And so it went, on the air and online, with the Huffington Post bannering a backlash story: “CODE BLUE: Rockefeller, Feingold, Pelosi Call Public Option Essential.” - Politico Story
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