How They Did It
How Obama saved the House bill from near-death and what Olympia Snowe really wanted from Congress.
Jonathan Cohn
TNR
Barack Obama, the law professor, was acting like a prosecutor. He’d invited Grassley to the Oval Office, to talk about the senator’s concerns. But he was using the occasion to confront Grassley about his latest statements. “Tell me what amendment you want, tell me what language you want,” one administration official recalls the president saying. And then, when Grassley couldn’t point to anything, the official says the president reminded Grassley that the amendment on end-of-life counseling had come from a Republican, Johnny Isakson of Georgia, and simply paid for professional advice when people wanted it. But Obama’s mind was already wandering to the new strategy he’d have to adopt. The first seven months of his presidency had been a test of his belief in civility and bipartisan cooperation. Now, he had the results. They were not encouraging.
Perhaps nothing epitomized the unmooring of the debate from reality better than the treatment of Ezekiel Emanuel, a prolific bioethicist and oncologist (and Rahm’s brother) who was advising Orszag at OMB. Right-wingers pulled out some stray quotes, mashed them together with the end-of-life counseling controversy, and decided that Emanuel was “Dr. Death,” intent upon forcing doctor-assisted suicide on the sick. In fact, the highly respected Emanuel had written a famous article for The Atlantic arguing against euthanasia. More respectable conservative intellectuals, like former McCain adviser Gail Wilensky, vouched for Emanuel and decried the distortions. Nobody could hear her above the screams of Fox News pundits.
Worse still, the White House seemed powerless to change the conversation. Some administration officials would later blame Congress, because of its glacial pace. “We didn’t actually have a product to sell or defend,” according to one senior official. Some would acknowledge internal disorganization. There was no official media “war room” for most of the summer, while rivalries between policy advisers (particularly DeParle and Orszag) diverted aides’ attention.
(More here.)
Jonathan Cohn
TNR
Barack Obama, the law professor, was acting like a prosecutor. He’d invited Grassley to the Oval Office, to talk about the senator’s concerns. But he was using the occasion to confront Grassley about his latest statements. “Tell me what amendment you want, tell me what language you want,” one administration official recalls the president saying. And then, when Grassley couldn’t point to anything, the official says the president reminded Grassley that the amendment on end-of-life counseling had come from a Republican, Johnny Isakson of Georgia, and simply paid for professional advice when people wanted it. But Obama’s mind was already wandering to the new strategy he’d have to adopt. The first seven months of his presidency had been a test of his belief in civility and bipartisan cooperation. Now, he had the results. They were not encouraging.
Perhaps nothing epitomized the unmooring of the debate from reality better than the treatment of Ezekiel Emanuel, a prolific bioethicist and oncologist (and Rahm’s brother) who was advising Orszag at OMB. Right-wingers pulled out some stray quotes, mashed them together with the end-of-life counseling controversy, and decided that Emanuel was “Dr. Death,” intent upon forcing doctor-assisted suicide on the sick. In fact, the highly respected Emanuel had written a famous article for The Atlantic arguing against euthanasia. More respectable conservative intellectuals, like former McCain adviser Gail Wilensky, vouched for Emanuel and decried the distortions. Nobody could hear her above the screams of Fox News pundits.
Worse still, the White House seemed powerless to change the conversation. Some administration officials would later blame Congress, because of its glacial pace. “We didn’t actually have a product to sell or defend,” according to one senior official. Some would acknowledge internal disorganization. There was no official media “war room” for most of the summer, while rivalries between policy advisers (particularly DeParle and Orszag) diverted aides’ attention.
(More here.)
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