Obama didn't get healthcare in 2009 because he lacked the political courage to pass such a sweeping piece of legislation with no Republican cover. He knew it was unpopular. He knew it would remain unpopular. He knew it would grow more and more unpopular as it aged. There was absolutely no legislative reason whatsoever, with the Democrat supermajority, that, if he LED, he couldn't have had it. There was no legislative reason. There was a character reason. He lacked the courage of his convictions. Further, his breathtakingly unrelenting narcissism carried him aimlessly aloft from issue to issue, echoing the frenetic domestic policy activity of Clinton in his first year in the White House, only Obama presented a kind of global a.d.d.. One country's soul was too small to contain The Handy Man's Fix. Everybody got the velvet hammer.
He tried to vote "present" again to get healthcare. That can work with 99 other Senators to carry you over the finish line. It can work when the coin of the realm is compromise and all the little ways you sold your soul are hidden in the arcane matrix of legalese. Unfortunately for Obama, in the very first job he has ever held in his entire life where others expect and demand that he actually make a decision, and stick to it, there's only one chair and one desk in the Oval Office, and it's all, totally, absolutely, 100% his. Unless you are a young John Kennedy, playing at the feet of your father, you can't hide under it.
The Republicans should demand transcripts of every word uttered in every meeting having anything whatsoever to do with healthcare to this point before word one is spoken on camera in this bipartisan circus Obama has set up for Thursday. Michelle Malkin's idea to ask for those transcripts is absolutely brilliant, because if done, it would reveal the democrats to be the party of "no" that the GOP is accused of being. "No" to everything except $300,000,000 bribes...
The last time we had very small children in the White House was President Kennedy, and it was charming, and lovely, and wonderful, even if, as the intervening years have revealed, an illusion. What a totally natural, familiar sight it was to have young John playing there with his father. We won't revisit was Clinton had going on under that desk, except to say that it was a kind of arrested development. Obama has not been forthcoming with the American people about what he wants vis-a-vis healthcare, because depending upon which videotape you reference, the one from 2007, 2008, or 2009, his core concerns change depending upon who he's talking to. When confronted with this, Obama reverts back to the childlike belief that even though a thing is there, right there, and everyone can see it, touch it, hear it, the simple act of saying it isn't so makes it not so.
Do we have another child under the desk?
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