Trust
by digby
Special “F. You” Note: To Blue Dog Jim Cooper (D-TN-05), who back in December extracted from the Obama team the promise of the convening of a “fiscal responsibility summit,” which he wanted to be included in the stimulus. Instead, Obama agreed two weeks in advance of the stimulus vote to convene such a summit in February, and I said Obama should have waited to see that Cooper and the Blue Dogs pony up on the stimulus before agreeing. Well, Obama didn’t wait, and Cooper (and five other Blue Dogs) didn’t show. What a surprise. There’s still time to disinvite them, of course. Think that’ll happen?
I guess all the Clintonites in the Obama administration forgot about Old Jim’s proclivities on these things. They should have called Mike Lux, who raised the alarm a year ago when the Obama campaign started using Cooper as a spokesman on health care policy:
I was part of the Clinton White House team on the health care reform issue in 1993/94, and no Democrat did more to destroy our chances in that fight than Jim Cooper. We had laid down a marker very early that we thought universal coverage was the most essential element to getting a good package, saying we were to happy to negotiate over the details but that universality was our bottom line. Cooper, a leader of conservative Dems on the health care issue, instead of working with us, came out early and said universality was unimportant, and came out with a bill that did almost nothing in terms of covering the uninsured. He quickly became the leading spokesman on the Dem side for the insurance industry position, and undercut us at every possible opportunity, basically ending any hopes we had for a unified Democratic Party position. I was never so delighted to see a Democrat lose as when he went down in the 1994 GOP tide.
Unfortunately, he came back, like a bad penny.
Perhaps the administration thinks that not playing the blame game with Cooper on this stimulus bill will buy them his loyalty on health care down the road (as the ever so perspicacious Chuck Todd predicts.)
Considering his history, I sure wouldn’t bet on it …
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