My take on it is that he tried to do the right thing, as he saw it, got raked over the coals and then his politician CYA instincts took over and he back-pedalled as fast as he could.
I, myself, would have argued my point as far as I could possibly take it. However, I have never been elected, let alone reelected, to public office so that is very easy for me to say.
That is the problem with being a politician. You can be a 100% consistent politician or you can be a reelected politician but it is almost impossible to be a 100% consistent reelected politician.
Given the political climate, a mandate will not work until the issue is explained to the population.
It seems that the prevailing, though unstated, objection is that an HPV vaccine implies that my daughter is a shameless hussy.
The reality of the viral chain is that, no matter how virtuous my daughter is, that no-good, man that is NEVER going to be good enough for my daughter (I know that even though I haven't met him yet) can't be trusted as far as you can throw him so all the other shameless hussies he's sleeping with before he meets my daughter need to be vaccinated in order to protect MY daughter.
That message is going to take a while to get across. Sometimes, the easiest thing for a politician to do is say, "Forget it!"
Go back in history and look up how long it took for some communities in the 1950's and 1960's to be convinced that fluoride in the drinking water .... as well as the Polio vaccine .... were not a Communist plot to destroy America.
