Where Was The Decider?

Where Was The Decider?

by digby

Greg Sargent makes a fascinating observation after reading Jonathan Alter’s new book on the first year of the Obama White House. After rightly noting that some liberals have been pounding their fists on this subject for a long, long time he notes that according to Alter, the White House knew fairly early on that bipartisanship was going nowhere:

Alter writes that top Obama aides concluded early that the pursuit for Chuck Grassley’s support in particular was not going to pay off. Senior Obama adviser Jim Messina, for instance, pleaded with Senator Max Baucus, who at the time was trying to cut an awesomely bipartisan deal with Senate Republicans, to forget about Grassley. Rahm Emanuel agreed with Messina that Grassley was a non-starter. “They thought the president was wasting his time by having Grassley over to the White House half a dozen times,” Alter writes. Harry Reid, too, had concluded early on that bipartisan support for health reform would never materialize — but he let Baucus continue pursuing it, anway.[…]

These players, of course, have their own reasons for leaking this account now. But it seems feasible. After all, a five year old could see at the time that Senate Republicans were playing for time, in order to drag the process on for as long as possible and sour the public on it. Depressing.
var entrycat = ‘Health reform, Senate Dems, Senate Republicans’

I haven’t read the book, so perhaps the question is answered within, but I’m genuinely curious as to where the president was on all this. It’s a little bit hard for me to believe that Rahm and Messina and Reid were the only ones with a say in this. Was Obama without an opinion?

I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that Obama backed the bipartisan approach because I think he really believes (or believed) in his ability to get everyone to agree. It’s been a huge part of his mystique (and I think it’s fairly common that successful politicians overrate their gifts in this particular area.)

It’s really no more than a curiosity at this point. More important is what lessons he took from all that.

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