Posted on 06/29/2009 6:52:58 PM PDT by Kaslin
Every general studies the mistakes of the last war, and President Obama's style has been much influenced by the difficulties of Bill Clinton's presidency.
In particular, Obama has shied away from handing Congress his own plans on "stone tablets," a phrase much loved by senior adviser David Axelrod, and instead allowed it room to legislate.
The president has won a lot, including a decent stimulus bill and laws on children's health coverage, tobacco regulation and employment discrimination that, in less exciting times, would have been seen as landmarks.
But the stimulus bill was neither as good nor as large as it might have been, and there was a legislative train wreck on Obama's effort to close Guantanamo prison.
And then there's his centerpiece campaign to reform the health care system.
Obama's initial approach of laying out principles and giving Congress latitude was the right response to Clinton's mistake of offering an immensely detailed proposal, only to see it mocked and rejected. Yet two big problems now confront health care reform that only Obama's intervention can solve.
The first is the absence of substantial Republican support for comprehensive change. Max Baucus, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, has done practically everything short of making ethanol a reimbursable prescription drug in order to win the heart of his good Republican friend from Iowa, Chuck Grassley.
(Excerpt) Read more at ibdeditorials.com ...
Flexible? Good. I don’t think there’s anything we’d like more than to see the president get bent.
Dionne is a little jerk supporting a neo-Marxist.
Sounds like Obama flavored Kool-aid.
Washington Post columnists have an IQ of 145.
That’s all of them combined - Dionne, Meyerson, Robinson, Cohen, Millbank, Ignatius, King - all of them.
To become a columnist at the Post you must demonstrate terrible writing ability, lack of logic and rational thought, scantily veiled reverse racism, and visceral hate for average Americans and their beliefs.
Who cares,Where’s that BC BO?You are really beginning to stink.
And Obama's approach is to lie about the real facts & give Congress the latitude to pass humongous bills loaded with pork, that nobody has time to read, not accept any Republican input & ram it down the throats of the American people.
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