Obama's latest Health Care Shenanigans

He just does not know how to lose gracefully ...

(btw, O gets a freebie commercial from CBS during the Super Bowl pre-game ... a sitdown w/ Katie Couric. To her credit, she asked a couple of tough questions about O, but let him slither away with a lack of follow up -- her questions simply skated the surface of more complex issues).

Also to Katie's credit, she asked whatever happened to Change You Can Believe In ?

Obama's response: Well, we have a website that shows every person that visited the White House.

Such an accomplishment ! Yay, O ! All Hail Transparent Hopium !


Obama Invites GOP to "Bipartisan Health-Care Summit" [Daniel Foster]

President Obama has invited Congressional Republicans to a half-day health-care summit, to be broadcast live from the Blair House later this month.

The president chose an interview with Katie Couric, aired just hours before the Super Bowl, to extend the offer:

Obama challenged Republicans to come to the discussion armed with their best ideas for how to cover more Americans and fix the health insurance system.

"I want to consult closely with our Republican colleagues," Obama told Couric. "What I want to do is to ask them to put their ideas on the table... I want to come back and have a large meeting, Republicans and Democrats to go through, systematically, all the best ideas that are out there and move it forward."

The invitation to join him later this month follows comments he made on Thursday during a speech at a Democratic fundraiser in which he said he wanted to sit with Republicans and "walk through the [health care plans] in a methodical way so that the American people can see and compare what makes the most sense."

It also comes just weeks after the president received high marks for engaging the House Republicans in a televised, 90-minute discussion at their retreat in Baltimore. The president has been hammered by critics who said his year-long push to revamp the health care system did not live up to his campaign promise to conduct the debate in the open.

On Friday, I told ya so:

Obama is pegging the hopes for health-care reform on a big, televised victory over Republicans on the merits. It's a desperate but admittedly novel gambit. I just don't think it will materialize. For one thing, Obama has been explaining and explaining his bill for over a year now, over which time the polls have shown support fade in inverse proportion to the rhetoric. At the State of the Union, armed with the national stage, Obama waited 50 paragraphs to broach the subject of health care, and when he did he offered nothing new or game-changing.

For another, the Republicans would be foolish to let Democrats stake the fate of this zombie of a bill on a televised publicity stunt. For a year, Democrats have built this trillion-dollar entitlement — every sweetheart deals, every kickback, and every carve-out — in the cloakrooms of Washington. Now, at the moment when transparency is at its most valuable as politics and its least valuable as policy, the administration has found religion, complete with much public wailing and teeth-gnashing about how openness was sacrificed at the altar of efficacy.

Republicans shouldn't let Obama get away with this. The time for Republicans to demonstrate the superiority of a conservative approach for lowering health-care costs and expanding coverage is after Obamacare is defeated, once and for all.

While I don't see a way the Republicans can effectively boycott this meeting, there are probably a number of things they can do to reveal it as the dog-and-pony show it truly is — just another whistle-stop on the permanent campaign. But as I said, for the past year, all the veto-players in this debate — Senate Republicans and moderates, House Blue Dogs, and the American people most of all — have had grave concerns with this bill, even as the Democrats have negotiated its most outrageous features far from the sunlight of public scrutiny. So I doubt even the most masterful of rhetorical performances from President Obama will change the prognosis of the bill — reconciliation or bust — but the very fact the White House is resorting to this strategem is a sign of just how few options they have left.