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December 22, 2009
Exclusive – Oval Office Watch – Tuesday, December 22
Will the Healthcare bill would be Obama's "Enabling Act?" SEE HERE.
Obama and Kerry slowing sanctions legislation push - HERE.
Obama's divisive talk not good for anyone
John David Powell, Worth-Reading.Blogspot.com
Barack Obama’s steady decline in the polls this week may mean the American people are tired of the president’s divisive campaign rhetoric after nearly a year into his administration. The Rasmussen Report’s daily tracking poll shows 53 percent of Americans disapprove of his performance in office.
With an economy shaking, unemployment rising, and two wars draining our nation’s human and financial resources, Mr. Obama prefers to use the divisive language of the campaign trail in hopes of gaining public and political support for economic policies rather than to provide the leadership his supporters sorely hoped he possessed. He demonstrated this us-versus-them style during his interview on CBS’s 60 Minutes this past Sunday when he used the term "fat cats" to describe banking executives in line for rather substantial, and contractual, year-end bonuses. Read article.
ObamaCare and the Liberal Obsession
Daniel Henninger, Online WSJ.com
If President Obama's health-care initiative fails, there is no longer a rationale for being a liberal in the United States. Everything else on liberalism's to-do list is footnotes.
Passing national health insurance has obsessed every Democratic president since Franklin Roosevelt. Even Harry Truman, for some conservatives a model of "moderate" Democratic politics, wanted it. Looking back, Truman wept and warned: "I've had some bitter disappointments as President, but the one that has troubled me most, in a personal way, has been the failure to defeat the organized opposition to a national compulsory health insurance program. But this opposition has only delayed and cannot stop the adoption of an indispensable federal health insurance plan."
No other issue has consumed more political energy in the U.S. than "health-care reform." Congress's half-year preoccupation with health care is only the latest blip in the Democrats' long march to a public option.
As we head to the final act, one element of this history stands out: The liberals' repeated failure to get it done.
The Democratic Mecca—a real national health insurance system available to all—has always encountered stiff resistance in Congress, notably as now from moderate Democrats. In the 1960s, Senate Finance Chairman Russell Long (of Mary Landrieu's Louisiana) railed publicly against Medicare's costs but as now, questions about cost were obliterated.
Frustrated at the failure to pass their "National Health Insurance" bill during the presidency of Dwight Eisenhower, the Democrats ratcheted back from the Euro-style idea of FDR and Truman to a plan that would cover only Social Security beneficiaries, the elderly. This was Medicare.
Medicare failed all its initial votes in 1960. A compromise known as Kerr-Mills, which limited federal coverage to the "indigent" elderly, passed the Senate by a vote of 91-2. Many said then that Kerr-Mills addressed the U.S.'s main problem, which was medicine for the poor. Ronald Reagan supported Kerr-Mills, arguing that people "worth millions of dollars" shouldn't be getting health care paid for by government.
For Democratic liberals, a lot is never enough. With John Kennedy's election, they resubmitted Medicare for the elderly regardless of income. Read article.
Obama and the Malleability of History
Victor Davis Hanson, NRO.com
In pursuit of noble goals, Obama ignobly twists the truth. President Obama has given a number of major speeches touching on world affairs since he announced his bid for the presidency. All have invoked historical examples — usually for moral purposes, but often at the expense of both literal and figurative truth.
THE VICTORY COLUMN SPEECH
1) Candidate Barack Obama had supposedly made a presumptuous request to speak at the Berlin Wall and been denied (the Germans might later have regretted that turndown, since a year later Obama, tit-for-tat, declined an invitation to speak there on the 20th anniversary of the wall’s fall), and so he chose the Victory Column as his backdrop instead.
It was an ironic setting for a historic speech on global peace, since the monument is formed of gun barrels taken from conquered enemies, and it commemorates defeats of the Danish, Austrians, and French — as well as Nazi chest-thumping over the annexation of Austria. The monument is an icon to aggressive nationalism, which is why the French wished to destroy it after World War II. Read article.
Why Democrats push health care, even if it kills them
Byron York, Washington Examiner.com
To some observers, the Democrats' race to pass national health care seems irrational -- even suicidal. Don't party leaders understand how much the public opposes the bills currently on the table? Don't they know that voters are likely to take their revenge at the polls next year? Given that, why do they keep rushing ahead?
Just look at the RealClearPolitics average of polls, which shows that Americans oppose the national health care bills currently on the table by a margin of 53 percent to 38 percent. That's not just one poll that might tilt right or left, it's an average of several polls by several pollsters. And the margin of opposition seems to be growing, not diminishing. And yet Democrats seem determined to defy public opinion. Why?
I put the question to a Democratic strategist who asked to remain anonymous. Yes, Democrats certainly understand that voters don't like the current bills, he told me, and they are fully aware they will probably pay a price next year. But they have found a way to view going ahead anyway as the logical thing to do, at least in their eyes.
You have to look at the issue from three different Democratic perspectives: the House of Representatives, the White House and the Senate.
"In the House, the view of [California Rep. Henry] Waxman and [House Speaker Nancy] Pelosi is that we've waited two generations to get health care passed, and the 20 or 40 members of Congress who are going to lose their seats as a result are transitional players at best," he said. "This is something the party has wanted since Franklin Roosevelt." In this view, losses are just the price of doing something great and historic. (The strategist also noted that it's easy for Waxman and Pelosi to say that, since they come from safely liberal districts.)
"At the White House, the picture is slightly different," he continued. "Their view is, 'We're all in on this, totally committed, and we don't have to run for re-election next year. There will never be a better time to do it than now.'"
"And in the Senate, they look at the most vulnerable Democrats -- like [Christopher] Dodd and [Majority Leader Harry] Reid -- and say those vulnerabilities will probably not change whether health care reform passes or fails. So in that view, if they pass reform, Democrats will lose the same number of seats they were going to lose before."
All those scenarios have a certain logic (even if the Senate calculation undercounts the number of potentially vulnerable Democrats). But each scenario is premised on passing an unpopular bill that hurts the party. Even if there's a strategic rationale for doing it, why are Democrats dead-set on hurting themselves? Read article.
Michele Bachmann warns: "Financial bill worse than healthcare measure."
Sarah Foster, NewsWithViews.com
A Republican congresswoman, who has been in the forefront of the fight against the healthcare bill, the climate control bill and other contentious measures, warned in an impromptu interview on Breitbart.tv Thursday evening, that a fast-tracked, under-the-radar mega-bill by Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., designed to overhaul the regulation of the entire financial services industry – and headed at the time for passage by the House -- is “even worse.”
“I know that’s hard to believe, but it is worse in the sense that every American makes financial transactions,” said Michele Bachmann, who represents the people of Minnesota’s Sixth Congressional District. “We all use credit cards, we all write checks. This will all now be controlled by government, and government will ration credit. You can’t have capitalism without capital, and government will decide who gets capital and who doesn’t.”
“The entirety of this bill -- all pinned together like this -- hasn’t even gone through committees,” Bachmann said. “It just went on the floor for three hours of debate. It’s a complete government control of the financial services industry and no one knows about it!” Read article.
Bachmann interview on Brietbart TV HERE.
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