You mean a speech didn’t solve this? “One day after President Obama pitched his plan for comprehensive health-care reform to a joint session of Congress, administration officials struggled Thursday to detail how he would achieve his goal of extending coverage to tens of millions of uninsured Americans without increasing the deficit.” Try as Obama might to make this about campaigning or speechifying, it turns out to be about governance.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is quite unpopular — 53 percent disapprove of her performance. The pollster says, “I have seen one other speaker in my career with name ID that high, and it was Newt Gingrich.”
Gov. Jon Corzine is also unpopular. He trails challenger Chris Christie by 8 points in the latest Rasmussen poll. But the race does appear to be narrowing somewhat.
ObamaCare, in a Rasmussen poll taken largely before Obama insulted town-hall attendees and declared everyone would have to get health-care insurance or pay a big fine, isn’t popular either. Forty-four percent approve and 53 percent don’t.
And card check, which isn’t popular at all with voters (even union voters), was slowed down in July, according to Sen. Tom Harkin, by Ted Kennedy’s illness. Well, that and the fact that there isn’t a single Republican senator for it, not to mention a bunch of Red State Democrats who would rather hold health-care town halls than vote on a measure that toxic. But it’s a good excuse to use on Harkin’s Big Labor patrons.
Rep. Joe Wilson may be rude and uncivil, but he was right — the president was lying about coverage of illegal aliens (among other things) in his speech. And Jake Tapper goes in for the kill with another installment of comedy gold.
On Wilson: “If this discussion becomes a question of ‘who lied,’ then the Democrats lose. Healthcare reform is their big enchilada. The administration can’t afford to get caught up in a game of liar liar, pants on fire. Been there, done that — thrice so far in 2009. Remember the Henry Louis Gates flap in July?” (h/t Glenn Reynolds)
The Wall Street Journal‘s editors on Obama’s disingenuous rhetoric on Medicare: “So no cuts, for anyone — except, that is, for the 24% of senior beneficiaries who are enrolled in the Medicare Advantage program, which Democrats want to slash by $177 billion or more because it is run by private companies. Mr. Obama called that money ‘unwarranted subsidies in Medicare that go to insurance companies — subsidies that do everything to pad their profits but don’t improve the care of seniors.’ In fact, Advantage does provide better care, which is one reason that enrollment has doubled since 2003.” No wonder seniors — who are intimately familiar with all this — have turned so dramatically against ObamaCare.
Michael Rubin on the failure of Obama’s Iranian “engagement” policy: “An Israeli strike would be a horrible outcome, but given the failure of this latest diplomatic initiative, and the Israeli government’s belief that they face an existential threat, the likelihood of military action has now gone through the roof.”
Charles Krauthammer on Van Jones: “You can’t sign a petition demanding not one but four investigations of the charge that the Bush administration deliberately allowed Sept. 11, 2001 — i.e., collaborated in the worst massacre ever perpetrated on American soil — and be permitted in polite society, let alone have a high-level job in the White House. … This is no trivial matter. It’s beyond radicalism, beyond partisanship. It takes us into the realm of political psychosis, a malignant paranoia that, unlike the Marxist posturing, is not amusing. It’s dangerous. In America, movements and parties are required to police their extremes. Bill Buckley did that with Birchers. Liberals need to do that with ‘truthers.’ ” And that they don’t tells us volumes about where liberalism is today.
