President Obama is continuing his practice of appearing to be in favor of both sides of every issue. It’s starting to look like the White House has a severe communication problem. Rahm Emanuel or Vice President Joe Biden will say one thing, Obama will say the opposite. And Obama is constantly contradicting himself.
This is by design. The Wall Street Journal explains the president’s public option two step. What we’re witnessing isn’t confusion, it’s deception.
Americans unschooled in liberal health-care politics may have trouble deciphering the White House’s conflicting proclamations this week about a new government insurance program for the middle class. Allow us to translate: President Obama loves this so-called public option, but he needs to sell it in a shroud of euphemism and the appearance of “compromise.” [...]
A rhetorical gong Mr. Obama has been banging a lot lately is the idea that the people pointing all this [problems with public option and how the democrats are pushing for it] out are liars. “When you hear the naysayers claim that I’m trying to bring about government-run health care,” he said in one speech, “know this: They’re not telling the truth.” He adds that opposition to a public option isn’t “based on any evidence” and that it is “illegitimate” to argue that his program is “is somehow a Trojan horse for a single-payer system.”
So much for changing the political tone. Perhaps the President should check in with his more honest liberal allies. Jacob Hacker, now a professor of political science at Berkeley, came up with the intellectual architecture for the public option when he was a graduate student in the 1990s. “Someone once said to me, ‘This is a Trojan horse for single payer,’ and I said, ‘Well, it’s not a Trojan horse, right? It’s just right there,’” Mr. Hacker explained in a speech last year. “I’m telling you, we’re going to get there, over time, slowly.”
The real question the political class is debating now is how slowly, or quickly, it takes to get there. And how they’re best able to disguise this goal — ideally as a “compromise.”
To seek the truth, pay attention when you hear the president say “there are those…”. Then go find out who “those” are he’s referring to and listen to what they have to say.
