photo: Progress Ohio via Flickr
Speaking at an OFA “Conversation with the President,” Barack Obama called for health care reform, telling the personal story of a former campaign staffer and OFA volunteer who recently lost a battle with cancer as an impetus to get the package done. However, he described the process for finishing the bill for the first time, which included a “methodical,” deliberate process that would involve Republicans and take “several weeks.”
Obama took a fair bit of time to make his pitch to a room full of OFA volunteers and thousands more watching over the Internet. His pitch was similar to what he’s made throughout the past couple weeks: that the bill is closer than health care reform has ever been and it must get over the line, and that Democrats cannot shrink from the challenge. But he added something new to this stump speech. He talked about someone who worked on the campaign from the St. Louis area, who recently succumbed to breast cancer. “She insisted she was going to be buried in an Obama t-shirt,” Obama said. And he continued,
She was fighting throughout the campaign. And it wasn’t to get me elected, or to help her with her situation. It was because she understood there were others behind her who were going to be in the same situation. How can I say to her, we’re giving up How can I say to her family, we’re giving up? How can Democrats on the Hill say this is politically too risky? How can Republicans say we’re better off blocking anything from happening? That can’t be the message the American people are delivering. Yes, they want jobs. And they don’t like the process in Washington, the sausage-making. But they don’t want us to offer them nothing. This is what we campaigned on. And we’re going to keep on working to get it done.
Supporters at the rally spontaneously broke out into a chant of “Yes we can” after that. Obama closed his remarks by saying “I’m still fired up, I’m still ready to go.”
This was all reminiscent of the campaign. But when he was asked how OFA members could specifically help him deliver on health care, he described a drawn-out process that would be slotted in after the passage of multiple jobs bills. This is a rough paraphrase:
Democrats in the House and Senate have worked the last several weeks to finalize a package. We know some of what it will have: 30 million more with coverage, creating an exchange to negotiate with insurers, insurance reforms that benefit everybody (blocking pre-existing conditions, rescissions, etc), and long-term cost reductions in the health care system.
The next step is to call on Republicans to present their ideas. I’d like to have a meeting with Republicans and Democrats and health care experts, go through these bills, walk through them in a methodical way so Americans can compare ideas.
Then we’ve gotta move forward on a vote.
So we should be very deliberate, take our time. We’re moving a jobs package forward over the next several weeks. That will allow everybody to get the real facts.
The idea of some meeting with Democrats and Republicans is new, and it’s part of this “new openness” that we’ve seen on display recently. Democrats and Republicans do meet, ostensibly to discuss ideas, in a televised format, every day. It’s called “the United States Congress.” There’s no reason such a debate couldn’t be done again. But the emphasis here is on a several week-long “cooling off period,” in the hopes that a more methodical or deliberative debate will somehow work out better.
I think that’s a mistake, but I also think it’s a bit of a cover story. Obama acknowledged that “it’s easy to scare people” about health care, because people have a natural fear of the unknown. There’s no reason to believe that wouldn’t change. This reliance on reason hasn’t worked to this point.
What I mean by a cover story is that Obama is basically, with this new offensive, trying to raise his approval ratings, and residually raise the approval ratings of his party. He wants to at least appear to be opening up the process, counteracting the process issues that really sunk health care’s popularity in December. And the hope is that would allow for enough space to get reform over the line. That’s a process of “several weeks,” and that might as well read months.
Among the more interesting moments came at the end of the question, where the President implicitly threatened the job security of the Congress if they don’t pass something on health care.
If Congress decides not to do it, the American people can make a judgment whether Congress did the right thing or not. There are elections coming up, and people can register their concerns during election time.
He didn’t specify Republicans or Democrats, but the statement could be applied equally to either party, and probably more to his own. If they get handed the largest majority in a generation and do almost nothing with it, and spend a year on their signature priority and get nothing out of it, what Obama said above will come true – they won’t be asked back to try again.
