Publicly, Obama seemed to side with Pelosi over his own chief of staff, professing his commitment to comprehensive reforms at the State of the Union.Never mind the skewed chronology there. I am convinced that what Obama said in the Stephanopoulos interview was almost universally misunderstood. That's by definition his fault -- he was unclear. But when he said, "I would advise that we try to move quickly to coalesce around those elements of the package that people agree on," and later referred to the "core elements of the bill," he meant the whole shebang -- new coverage rules, individual mandate, exchanges, subsidies, funding from Medicare cuts, cost-control measures. In fact, his whole subsequent course of action -- re-presenting the "core elements," exposing the bankruptcy of Republican thinking, scrubbing the bill of individual carve-outs -- was laid out in outline -- faint outline -- in that interview, and then somewhat more clearly in the State of the Union a week later.
But he was also sending deeply mixed signals. In a closely watched interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos a day after Brown’s win, Obama expressed support for a quickly-passed bill containing only “the core elements” of reform.
This dawned on me on January 30, when I made the case in detail in a close reading of the Stephanopoulos interview. Here is the gist of that post:
[Re the Stephanopoulos interview] I began to think I had misread it the first time. That's partly Obama's fault; his language was unclear. But his thinking at that point was, I think, completely consistent with his presentation of the health care reform task in the State of the Union address a week later. In both cases, he studiously avoiding speaking as a tactical party leader. He gestured toward one more reach-out to Republicans. He left the door open to picking up a Senate Republican vote or two and therefore going back to negotiating a merged Senate-House bill, rather than trying to navigate the much messier process of the House passing the Senate bill and negotiating fixes to be achieved through reconciliation.
But also in both, he asserted that the HCR bill had been misrepresented, that its key parts were interdependent, and that a full-scale bill must be passed. In the interview, when he said, " I would advise that we try to move quickly to coalesce around those elements of the package that people agree on," he was not talking about a scaled-down package. "People" may have nominally included Republicans (or not nominally, if he thinks that his own advocacy may pull in a Republican or two). But essentially, Obama meant that Democrats need to recognize that the core elements in both bills cannot be pulled apart, and that they therefore need to find a way to negotiate or live with whatever parts of the bill they find objectionable and get the core elements -- i.e., in all likelihood, the Senate bill -- passed.
Below is the by-now-somewhat-infamous "core elements" statement in the ABC interview. Look at the passage in light of the SOTU address and Obama's re-presentation of the bill to House Repulbicans yesterday:
The weakness in that interview lay not only in the charged ambiguity of the injunction to "coalesce around the core elements of the package that people agree on" but in a weak response to Stephanopoulos' misinterpretation of the passage in which that phrase appeared:
I'm convinced, however, that "core elements" meant "full package" because of the internal consistency in the strategy that Obama laid out and has begun to execute in the interview, the SOTU, and the meeting with the Republican caucus. Here are the steps, reiterated in all three forums:
Politico may be right that "Pelosi steeled the White House," especially if you read "Rahm Emanuel" for "White House." And Obama did leave the Democrats to pull in ten directions for (almost) ten days without providing clear direction. But his commitment never wavered. And starting wth the SOTU, he plotted a clear and ever-clearer course.
[Re the Stephanopoulos interview] I began to think I had misread it the first time. That's partly Obama's fault; his language was unclear. But his thinking at that point was, I think, completely consistent with his presentation of the health care reform task in the State of the Union address a week later. In both cases, he studiously avoiding speaking as a tactical party leader. He gestured toward one more reach-out to Republicans. He left the door open to picking up a Senate Republican vote or two and therefore going back to negotiating a merged Senate-House bill, rather than trying to navigate the much messier process of the House passing the Senate bill and negotiating fixes to be achieved through reconciliation.
But also in both, he asserted that the HCR bill had been misrepresented, that its key parts were interdependent, and that a full-scale bill must be passed. In the interview, when he said, " I would advise that we try to move quickly to coalesce around those elements of the package that people agree on," he was not talking about a scaled-down package. "People" may have nominally included Republicans (or not nominally, if he thinks that his own advocacy may pull in a Republican or two). But essentially, Obama meant that Democrats need to recognize that the core elements in both bills cannot be pulled apart, and that they therefore need to find a way to negotiate or live with whatever parts of the bill they find objectionable and get the core elements -- i.e., in all likelihood, the Senate bill -- passed.
Below is the by-now-somewhat-infamous "core elements" statement in the ABC interview. Look at the passage in light of the SOTU address and Obama's re-presentation of the bill to House Repulbicans yesterday:
...it is very important to look at the substance of this package and for the American people to understand that a lot of the fear mongering around this bill isn't true. I would advise that we try to move quickly to coalesce around those elements of the package that people agree on. We know that we need insurance reform, that the health insurance companies are taking advantage of people. We know that we have to have some form of cost containment because if we don't, then our budgets are going to blow up and we know that small businesses are going to need help so that they can provide health insurance to their families. Those are the core, some of the core elements of, to this bill. Now I think there's some things in there that people don't like and legitimately don't like. If they think for example that there's a carve out for just one or two particular groups or interests, I think some of that, clearing out some of that under brush, moving rapidly..I originally thought that that statement was at odds with this one:
If you ask the American people about health care, one of the things that drives them crazy is insurance companies denying people coverage because of preexisting conditions. Well, it turns out that if you don't -- if you don't make sure that everybody has health insurance, then you can't eliminate insurance companies -- you can't stop insurance companies from discriminating against people because of preexisting conditions. Well, if you're going to give everybody health insurance, you've got to make sure it's affordable. So it turns out that a lot of these things are interconnected.But in fact they're complementary. The only pull-back that Obama is really suggesting in the first package is in the carve-outs for Nebraska and Louisiana.
Now, I could have said, well, we'll just do what's safe. We'll just take on those things that are completely noncontroversial. The problem is the things that are noncontroversial end up being the things that don't solve the problem.
The weakness in that interview lay not only in the charged ambiguity of the injunction to "coalesce around the core elements of the package that people agree on" but in a weak response to Stephanopoulos' misinterpretation of the passage in which that phrase appeared:
STEPHANOPOULOS: So start again with a smaller core package.That would be fine, if Obama made it clearer that the "core elements of this package" are essentially the whole shebang -- exchanges, subsidies, individual mandates, employer mandates, coverage rules, cuts to Medicare Advantage. He didn't, when asked directly, though he did suggest as much later. Was it ambivalence? Deliberate ambiguity, designed to give an appearance of being open to 'new ideas'? Just a failure of clarity? Who knows?
OBAMA: Well, look, I'm not going to get into the legislative strategy. First of all, my job is to as president, is to send a message in terms of where we need to go. It's not to navigate how Congress...
STEPHANOPOULOS: It's to set direction.
OBAMA: It's to set direction and the direction I think that has to be set is to identify those core elements of this package and to get that done.
I'm convinced, however, that "core elements" meant "full package" because of the internal consistency in the strategy that Obama laid out and has begun to execute in the interview, the SOTU, and the meeting with the Republican caucus. Here are the steps, reiterated in all three forums:
- Re-present the bill, explain what it does
- Explain why its "core elements" cannot be pulled apart
- "Reach out" to Republicans, which means expose the bankruptcy of their "ideas"
- Find a way to get the Senate bill -- or, if things go optimally, a properly merged Senate-House bill, passed.
Politico may be right that "Pelosi steeled the White House," especially if you read "Rahm Emanuel" for "White House." And Obama did leave the Democrats to pull in ten directions for (almost) ten days without providing clear direction. But his commitment never wavered. And starting wth the SOTU, he plotted a clear and ever-clearer course.
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