The lefty corners of the media are seething. Sweet!
Salon: “What went wrong? Why couldn’t Obama deliver?”
Krugman: “… it’s hard to avoid the sense that a crucial opportunity is being missed, that we’re at what should be a turning point but are failing to make the turn.” And Reaganism rules! (But he means that as a bad thing!)
Santa Barbara Independent: “Obama Blinks … Dems undercut by president’s waffling on healthcare ‘public option’
Rachel Maddow: “”Why is the public option dying now? It’s dying because of a lack of political ambition. The Democrats are too scared of their own shadow ….”
And a pleasingly cynical take from The American Prospect: “Because the public option has stood no realistic chance of being enacted in the form it was conceived, its main value all along this year has been as a bargaining chip. The proposal will now have served a valuable political purpose if, by sacrificing it, the White House is able to provide enough cover to Democratic senators from red states to get a bill out of the Senate Finance Committee, through the upper chamber, and into conference with the House.”
He will lose young people and the left if he forces them to pay tribute to Blue Cross with no cost controls and no competition. There is no constituency who supports that. I could run the campaign against that tomorrow. I very well may. But even if I don’t, the Republicans will.
The White House is obviously looking at similar numbers, hence Obama’s reactive leap to sell the the remnants in the “goody bag” that were left after Rahm sold everything else off to PhRMA and AHIP. Which, by the way, do nothing to address the structural problems in the health care system, they just force the public to throw billions at Wellpoint’s bottom line.
The ability to pass of snake oil and call it French perfume has its limits.
If you think that snake oil is smelly, wait until Obamacare has been larded up with the usual array of bribes and kickbacks in the form of unrelated amendments, earmarks, and additional buyoffs for the hospital operators and pharma guys. Any bets on whether any ethanol pipeline loan guarantees make it into the final bill?