As he said in his State of the Union address, Obama went to talk with the Republicans.
The video is 66 minutes long and makes for very entertaining and engaging political television. I think he did a great job fending off their attacks and addressing their complaints.
What do you think?
Give politicians a TV camera and you feed their ego for a day,
Teach them to use a teleprompter and you feed their ego’s for a lifetime.
Did you view the video?
Huh? There are no teleprompters visible and instead, Obama read from a prepared statement that was on notes in front of him. The Q & A (or at least the A part) was unscripted.
This is seriously weak sauce. Obama answered questions in detail for an hour, uncscripted–when the time was up he actually let them run over to keep the discussion going. It was exactly the kind of serious discussion we beg for from politicians.
I really enjoyed it. They should do this at least once a month.
Part of me thinks that Obama was fine with letting the partisanship continue so long as the Democrats controlled 60 senators. But now that they have 59 he’s actually trying to draw the Republicans closer.
The GOP did not come out looking any good at all in that Q & A.
This is an example of utter, unthinking partisan sniping.
I really admired it, and things like this make me glad I voted for Obama.
Sadly, I don’t think you can negotiate with the current GOP. I think they are so radicalized that they feel anything but total submission to their worldview is treason at best. They abuse the filibuster, then have the gall to go on TV and say Obama needs to be ‘bipartisan’ and work with the other party (after they block much legislation). And ‘bipartisan’ involves implementing their agenda even though their agenda cost them 2 election cycles and doesn’t work. The GOP has a lot of gall, I will give them that.
So Obama goes out there and says ‘if you have good ideas that are proven to work, give them to me’ but the ideas the GOP give are ideological but economists show would never work in the real world. So Obama throws them out.
I liked it when Pence said the GOP stimulus would create 2x more jobs for half the money. Obama just looked at him dumbfounded and said ‘why would I want to turn down an idea like that if it worked. Problem is I could never find a legitimate economist who agreed with those numbers’.
But anyway, if we were a sane democracy Obama would be a great leader. But we aren’t. The GOP is run by people like Limbaugh and Glenn Beck. The democratic party has radicals, but they do not run the show like they do in the GOP. I consider myself a pretty liberal person, but if the GOP has ideas that are proven to be effective I’d like to see them implemented. We have serious problems that need to be addressed by anyone who can address them. The problem is the GOP is more of a religion than a pragmatic political party at this point. And their ideas exist more for ideological purity (smaller government, lower taxes, supply side economics, aggressive militarism, etc) than to better the fate of the country.
And it is a shame. Obama really does sometimes come across as a once in a generation leader who wants to work hard to solve the serious problems we are facing. The problem is the GOP is radicalized and you can’t work with them. It is like putting Trotsky and Gorbachev together, it doesn’t work. One is a pragmatist, the other is a wild eyed radical who thinks reality should fit his ideology and not the other way around.
Either way, kudos to Obama for trying to be an adult. But you can’t negotiate with religious fanatics.
It’s funny. This is a perfect example which shows how the “Obama needs a teleprompter” meme is just so much bullshit… and people like you completely ignore it in favor of your own, preferred, reality.
Kinda says something about the entire Republican mindset, I think.
I thought if anything could kill the teleprompter meme, this was it. But among the unthinking, facts are entirely irrelevant. The whole thing reminded me of the old Roadrunner cartoons, with the Pubs playing the part of Wile E. Coyote. Every little trap was turned on them, every anvil they dropped rained down on them instead. As they licked their wounds they must have felt like the sheriff in Jaws who said “we need a bigger boat”.
Which material Republican values or ideas or proposals were incorporated into either the House or Senate Bill? Something significant with regard to the structure of the changes, in the prongs of the overall strategy to be employed once this miraculous Bill was passed, that is. What ideas again? I forget. (If somebody brings up the abortion red herrings, I’ll puke.)
Listen, both sides shut each other out, with the only difference being (for a time) that the Dems didn’t care because they didn’t need any help. If both sides were truthful, they would say that their ideals with regard to health care are diametrically opposed, and no real compromise is possible. Only a sort of nonsensical, pleases-no-one consensus is in the cards, it seems to me; and I suspect that’s what we’ll get now that Teddy is spinning in his grave over the last election. That’s better than what was teed up, so I’ll take it.
I would much more respect the Dems (who briefly had the unassailable position) if they had described their circumstance thusly. All that “we welcome Republicans who will agree with exactly what we want” balderdash was sickening, when clearly the only function the Republicans could have served, given the objective, was to pick up the doughnuts while the Dems hashed out the details of the Bill.
Neither do I believe that the Republicans have any interest in compromise. But it’s comical how often this bullshit is served up–those other guys are so fucking partisan, man!–with the president himself telling the Republicans to get off of the sidelines when in reality Obama and his idiot frat brothers in Congress locked the door, because they had no need for them. Now that they need them, it’s time for bipartisan discussion, it’s time to abandon the politics of “no.” “Sadly,” my ass. It is to laugh.
]The Republican “proposals” (the updated ones, with a few actual numbers added) were analyzed by CBO. It found no change at all from the status quo on any key parameter.
Examples
IOW, “No”, and how can you compromise with that? Why should you?
There was no public option in the Senate bill. I’d call that significant.
If only Bush had used a teleprompter more.
I didn’t watch the video but read snippets of it on the web. I loved how Obama took on their concerns and questions but sadly, I see no reason to trust these traitors. They’ll be just like Grassley, telling Obama to his face that they’re willing to try more bipartisanship and then going to their constituents and telling them Obama’s the devil.
Obama is right. The GOP has demonized him to such a degree that it would be politically difficult for any of them to back off of their hateful rhetoric and support him. They’ve painted themselves into a corner, and now America has to suffer for it
Like I said, if the GOP has solutions that will drive up quality and drive down cost, they should present them. I think (in my amateur understanding) there is a strong role for competition. If hospitals and pharmacies openly posted the prices and people could pick which one has the best care for the lowest price, that would be great. It’d be like half.com. You say which surgery or drug you want, then you get a list of domestic & international health care providers and their costs.
The website pharmacychecker.com already does this. There are also some websites like treatmentabroad that do that.
With pharmacychecker, if you check a drug like advair, the costs can be dramatically different. Costco is $206, whereas doctorsolve is $55.
http://www.pharmacychecker.com/Pricing.asp?DrugName=Advair+Diskus&DrugId=18398&DrugStrengthId=102104
These are conservative policies that will work to improve quality and drive down costs (making prices transparent and giving people the opportunity to shop for the cheapest meds and cheapest surgery). But they aren’t bringing them to the table.
However I think both parties would oppose those reforms because both would offend the pharmaceutical industry and hospital industry. So I’m not saying the dems would support those policies and the GOP would oppose them. Both parties would oppose them since they piss off corporate America. However they are conservative policies and they would work.
The GOP seems to have a variety of ideological purity tests (militarism, xenophobia, smaller government, lower taxes, lower regulations, supply side economics) and their solutions seem to just be tools to implement those ideologies.
What are their solutions to the health care crisis:
Say illegal immigrants are driving up costs (xenophobia)
cut regulations (smaller government, lower regulations)
tax cuts (lower taxes)
prevent people from suing doctors (lower regulations)
My problem with the GOP is they seem to start with the ideology, then get the policy to implement that ideology. You can’t run a country in the 21st century that way. Deng Xiaoping realized that in 1978 and dramatically reformed how China works. As a result China is experiencing record growth.
For example, the GOP feels if you make it harder to sue doctors, it’ll save money. The CBO and GAO say it won’t make much of a difference. If it worked, that be one thing. But the GOP starts with ideology, then crafts policy to implement it. Whether that policy makes a difference or not is not relevant.
The republican party needs a Deng Xiaoping (a pragmatist). Instead they have Sarah Palin as their standard bearer.
Some of the ideas in the patients choice act like an emphasis on prevention, eliminating pre-existing conditions, a health insurance exchange, etc are good. But the bill already has an emphasis on those things and the GOP still tries to block it.
Leaving out one of the base’s wet dream portions of the bill because there wasn’t even enough Democratic support for it is not the same as actually including a Republican proposal.
No public option? Using the existing private insurance infrastructure? Not implementing a nationalized health care system in which doctors are employed by the govt directly? Limiting tax deductibility of employer provided health insurance which conservatives say is responsible for the current health care mess because it ties insurance to employment?
The parties have differing objectives, so it’s disingenuous to use the Dem’s specific objectives as the starting point. Additionally, the Dem’s plan will drive down costs only if one believes the accounting gimmicks and Medicare cuts (which have not been voted in for the past seven years) which will offset the nearly $900B cost. We have zero reason to believe these offsets will materialize. They never have. It is enormous dishonesty for them to pretend this is the time they really mean it.
The Dem plan is an insurance reform plan; the actual medical cost reduction portions are magical speculation. Which brings me back to the same point. The Dems want expanded coverage, and pretend that this can be done without adding expense. The Republicans won’t join in that pretense, so they dismiss the objective as unachievable. With that as a given, what compromise is possible? Each side points to the other as obstructionist and delusional. Repeat ad infinitum.