Jarrett: Obama Absolutely Committed to Health Care Reform

Obama and his advisors

Obama is meeting with his cabinet this weekend, and this morning on the Meet the Press roundtable, Harold Ford suggested that part of their meeting will include coming up with strategies to combat the trolls, uh, I mean the republicans who are merely trying to derail reform --to kill the bill, as Ford says.
In this interview, Valerie Jarrett says Obama won't be derailed.

AL HUNT: Welcome back. We continue our look at health care with the president’s top aide and confidant, Valerie Jarrett. Valerie, let me ask you this - Congress missed the president’s deadline of August to pass both measures to both houses, Senate Finance Committee seems deadlocked, lobbyists are going to be out in full force in August. Are you worried that this thing may be slipping away?

VALERIE JARRETT: No not at all. We have a great deal of confidence that we’re going to have health-care reform passed this year. If you look at how far we’ve come, we’ve come further in health-care reform this year than we probably have in the last 50 years.

There are ample areas where there’s a great deal of agreement and I think we’re at that home stretch and it was important that the president set a deadline, it added some discipline to the process, and we’re confident that we’ll see it come to fruition in the fall.

HUNT: What will he do in the next couple weeks? What will be his message the next few weeks? What new message will he put out there?

JARRETT: Well, the message will be the message that he has been taking to the American people since this began; he laid forth a framework for why we needed this, why it was so urgent to have them right now. We have to reduce costs; we have to make sure that it is affordable. We have to make sure that if you lose your job you don’t have to worry about health care. If you have a pre-existing condition you don’t have to worry about health care.

We have to make sure that we’re really focusing on outcomes and that we’re looking towards making people healthier. The basic parameters that the president set forth are the ones to which there’s a great deal of consensus, not just in Congress, but if you look at it this is the first time we’ve been able to have AARP and the pharmaceutical industry and the physicians and the nurses -

HUNT: But not the insurance industry.

JARRETT: - one cross-section of support. We’re working on them. A lot of the insurance companies are coming along as well.

HUNT: The president expressed his frustration in the Time magazine interview with the critics and in his speech this week he said he was sick and tired of some of this criticism. Is this getting to him?

JARRETT: No, not at all. Listen, there is no one more resilient, more tenacious and more committed to this issue of health-care reform than the president.

The economy is fragile, if you think about what happened in the last six months, the president really was able to rescue the economy, bring it back from the precipice of disaster, and now we’re working on rebuilding it. So as people are trying to focus on making ends meet, feeding their family, paying for college tuition; health care is the single biggest challenge that we face.

HUNT: He’s done that and yet the Pew Poll shows that support for his agenda; health care and his handling of the economy, he slipped rather dramatically in the polls. Why is that?

Jarrett answers the poll question and also talks about CEO pay. Read the rest at Bloomberg.

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Obama: 2008 Election Fascinating Slice of Americana

Obama with China's vice premier

In a Dec. 2008 interview, Obama called the election novel worthy. I'm sure somone's working on that.
Here are some excerpts from a juicy story in WaPo offering a behind the scenes look in the "The Battle for America 2008," a new book that's out:

"I don't think I was the most interesting character in the election," he said, noting "a whole cast of characters at the beginning who are fascinating in their own right, in some ways compelling just from a human perspective: John Edwards, Huckabee. And then comes the general election [and] you get Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber. You've got Reverend Wright, Bill Ayers. It's a pretty fascinating slice of Americana."

e was asked how the writer in him would spin the tale of what ultimately happened in 2008. "The way I would tell the story would really have to do with what this campaign said about America and where we've traveled," Obama said. "The fact that just a little over 40 years after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, that I can run. That just a few decades after women were admitted to professions like law or medicine in any meaningful numbers, that Hillary could run in a credible way. The generational changes between John McCain's era and our own, and sort of the vestiges of Vietnam, the shift that's taken place in the salience of some of the culture wars that emerged in the '60s that really were the dominant force in our politics, starting with Ronald Reagan, and how that had less power. Which, by the way, includes why the issue of Reverend Wright or Bill Ayers never caught as powerfully as it might have 15 or 20 years ago. The way the Internet served our campaign in unprecedented ways."

Axelrod on Hillary Clinton:

The second half of the Axelrod memo was more personal and pointed. "We should not get into a White Paper war with the Clintons, or get twisted into knots by the elites," he wrote. He argued that the issue of experience was overrated but said strength was not, and he conceded that Clinton, because of all she had weathered, was seen by voters as a candidate of strength. "But," he added, "the campaign itself also is a proving ground for strength."

Clinton, he wrote, "will try to command the race early. . . . Her goal will be two: to suggest that she has the beef, while we offer only sizzle; and that she is not about the past but the future. But for all her advantages, she is not a healing figure. As much as she tacks to the right, she will have a hard time escaping the well-formulated perceptions of her among swing voters as a left-wing ideologue."

Axelrod is a wise man. Axelrod advising on Obama's past drug use:

Axelrod also warned that Obama's confessions of youthful drug use, described in his memoir, "Dreams From My Father," would be used against him. "This is more than an unpleasant inconvenience," he wrote. "It goes to your willingness and ability to put up with something you have never experienced on a sustained basis: criticism.

Read the whole story. It's pretty good.

McCain Palin Attacks Not the Same as Obama's

I'm tired of people lumping in Obama with McCain as a negative campaigner. It's just not true. For about a year, maybe more, there has been an underground smear campaign against Obama. What's happening now, is McCain, thanks largely to Palin, bought the wingnut strategy. In fact, safe to say, McCain doomed his candidacy when he chose Palin.

Salon: The Washington Post’s Dan Balz has an article today perfectly illustrating how the modern journalist’s conception of “balance” leads them to distort the truth. Balz’s article is about the increasing use of “character attacks” in the presidential race, and rather than state the truth — that the McCain/Palin ticket is now relying almost exclusively on some of the ugliest and most outright dangerous character smears seen in a modern presidential election — Balz instead pretends that this is a phenomenon of which both sides are guilty in equal measure:
At a time when the nation needs inspiration and confidence-building, the two candidates running for president are trying to ensure that whoever ends up winning next month will be seen as unfit by a sizable portion of the population.
To see the two candidates in a pair of appearances here in Ohio over the past two days is to see John McCain and Barack Obama attacking each other not just because of their different visions and prescriptions for the problems the country is now facing, but going straight at each other over character, fitness and behavior.
Has Balz bothered to watch the news for the last week? The rallies at John McCain and Sarah Palin’s events are rabid, drooling lynch mobs spouting the most vile and extreme accusations against Barack Obama personally that can be imagined. Here is what the AP report of the McCain/Palin event today in Ohio describes — now a regular, daily feature of their events:
....
Saying that McCain has been ”erratic” over the past couple of months is plainly true and, even if it weren’t, it is a claim about McCain’s behavior as a leader, as a candidate, and his ability to lead the country. By obvious contrast —as Balz himself says — “McCain’s code is to suggest something sinister about Obama, to say there is something lurking in his past that Americans should fear.” Those accusations exist in different universes. Beyond that, 100% — 100% — of all McCain ads are now negative attacks on Obama, while only 1/3 of Obama ads entail negative attacks on McCain.
read the rest