Howard Dean: Dems will ‘Rue the Day They Didn’t Go To Budget Reconciliation to Pass This Bill’
23 November 2009 6:00 pm by Taylor Marsh
Howard Dean this morning with Dylan Ratigan.
It makes me think back to when this all began.
Pres. Obama didn’t want to go down the Clinton road, understandably, to write the bill out of the White House. The first time ended horribly. So, he stayed out of it, letting Congress do its thing, committee by committee, month by month, ending in a torturous path that led to Sarah Palin’s “death panels.” Then the tea party activists rose up, with the outcome that Democrats lost out on messaging.
Come fall, Obama was compelled to step in. Now he owns health care.
Guess what? Pres. Obama was always going to own it, but he naively thought that he could charm Republicans into bipartisan action, which proved to be a near fatal mistake. The result was Stupak-Pitts passing the House, bringing Obama out to say, “…this is a health care bill, not an abortion bill. … And we’re not looking to change what is the principle that has been in place for a very long time, which is federal dollars are not used to subsidize abortions.”
The moral of this story is that even though Barack Obama didn’t want to coerce the health care debate he’s had to do just that. It was always going to be this way. Someone inside Obamaland should have figured that out from the start.
