Catching Up With Village Wisdom

by digby

Chris Matthews says that the President is out there selling his health care plan. Has anyone seen the president’s plan? I’m kind of curious to see what it is.

Chuck Todd (who Greenwald eviscerates today) came on to explain that Obama just wants to sign something and then he’ll spend the next six months convincing the people that the plan was actually health care reform. The president was meeting as they spoke with what some people call hard right Senators (he calls them” pragmatic conservatives”) Bob Corker and Saxby Chamblis. So maybe there’s hope of a biaprtisan understanding.

Matthews mused that if Obama would only reach out to Republicans instead of shunning them the way Teddy did with Carter and Clinton did with Jim Cooper, then he could get something passed that would be bipartisan, which everyone knows is really the only way to get something the public will accept. He wants Obama to get the Republicans to sign on so that he doesn’t have to go around selling his plan after the fact.

Meanwhile, here’s the man who not one elected member of the Republican party feels he or she can publicly criticize, earlier today:

And we had a call earlier, a drive-by call – wasn’t able to hang on. “Rush, you’re over-reading this. Obama doesn’t know what he’s doing. He’s over his head.” Well let me allow for that; somebody knows what they’re doing then. Rahm Emanuel, Soros, Axelrod, Mayor Daley who’s running his show. Somebody knows what they’re doing if he’s just a figure – I don’t care. My guess is he knows exactly what – he’s been raised by communists. Frank Davis, Saul Alinsky — his mentors — Reverend Wright. He’s been raised by people who despise free markets and capitalism. It’s unjust and it’s immoral and it’s unfair. I don’t care whether he’s a figurehead and they put the words for him on the prompter and his job is to go out and sell it and bone up on enough so that he can sound intelligent when he’s talking about — I don’t care. Somebody’s doing it.

Obama’s got a very tough sell on his hands, I’d say.

The House Republicans did offer a plan of their own that Obama could agree to if he wants to get their cooperation:

The four-page Republican health care outline lays out a plan that would allow states, associations and small businesses to pool together to offer health insurance. It would give tax credits to low and modest income Americans to help them buy health insurance. It would also let dependents under twenty-five stay on their parent’s health insurance.

And this came from the Senate Republicans:

“This supposed health care fix is a health care failure and a disaster for the American people,” Sen. Judd Gregg, R-N.H., said. “We still have time to turn this process around instead of steamrolling our country into a sub-par government-run plan, but it will require serious action from Democrats and Republicans and a pledge to put politics aside.”

If Todd is right (which would be unprecedented) this would be what Obama would have to accept to get “pragmatic conservatives” like Chamblis and Corker to sign on. They will not agree to anything that restricts the insurance companies in any way or creates a true public option. And they might not even sign on to that if it meant they would be seen as “voting for health care reform” which among their followers is akin to voting against every American’s right to shoot first and ask questions later. But it’s the only chance there is of bipartisan health care reform — basically doing nothing.

Chris and Chuck have great health care themselves, so it isn’t a big problem for them. To them legislation is all a game, which is scored by how many members of the opposing team the president is able to convince to vote with him. The more Republican votes he gets, the bigger the win. By their reckoning, George W. Bush getting substantial Democratic votes for his worst decisions meant that he was a successful president. And if it weren’t for the strong disagreement of the American people, they would have scored him exactly that way.

The only thing that matters is if it works. Let’s hope that Obama’s vaunted pragmatism is applied to that reality instead of embracing the silly beltway establishment definition of success. Right now, bipartisanship is a recipe for failure.

Update: Should have included this, which indicates that the administration really is getting off the biaprtisan bandwagon. We think.
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