Mike Pence Is Exactly Right
Wednesday night, President Obama will give another speech on health care reform, this time during a joint session of Congress. While being respectful in tone, Mike Pence, (R-IN), captures it all with this statement:
MSNBC Host Andrea Mitchell: Republican Congressman Mike Pence from Indiana is Chairman of the House Republican Conference. Good to see you, Mr. Chairman. Let’s talk about health care. What can the president say tomorrow that will persuade any House Republicans that they should join in a bipartisan effort?
Rep. Mike Pence: Well, I think it’s important to state emphatically that after a tumultuous five weeks of August town hall meetings by Republicans and Democrats across the country, that the American people don’t want another speech on health care, they want another plan on health care. And I think the challenge the president has tomorrow night, not only among Members of Congress but among the American people, is to demonstrate that he’s been listening to the American people who don’t want a government takeover, they don’t want $800 billion in higher taxes, but they do want health care reform that will lower the cost of health insurance and lower the cost of health care for Americans in the future.
After all this time, after all the tumultuous townhall meetings, President Obama is persisting in trying yet another sales pitch to sell a rejected product. It’s as if he hasn’t accepted as fact what the American people aren’t buying what he’s selling. Then again, I could see how it’d be difficult for a narcissist like him to accept that he can’t sell anything he wants to whomever he wants whenever he wants.
If there’s anything valuable to be taken from Camille Paglia’s column, and there is, it’s that President Obama’s biggest enablers have hurt him with their enabling:
As an Obama supporter and contributor, I am outraged at the slowness with which the standing army of Democratic consultants and commentators publicly expressed discontent with the administration’s strategic missteps this year. I suspect there had been private grumbling all along, but the media warhorses failed to speak out when they should have, from week one after the inauguration, when Obama went flat as a rug in letting Congress pass that obscenely bloated stimulus package. Had more Democrats protested, the administration would have felt less arrogantly emboldened to jam through a cap-and-trade bill whose costs have made it virtually impossible for an alarmed public to accept the gargantuan expenses of national healthcare reform. (Who is naive enough to believe that Obama’s plan would be deficit-neutral? Or that major cuts could be achieved without drastic rationing?)
By foolishly trying to reduce all objections to healthcare reform to the malevolence of obstructionist Republicans, Democrats have managed to destroy the national coalition that elected Obama and that is unlikely to be repaired. If Obama fails to win reelection, let the blame be first laid at the door of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, who at a pivotal point threw gasoline on the flames by comparing angry American citizens to Nazis. It is theoretically possible that Obama could turn the situation around with a strong speech on healthcare to Congress this week, but after a summer of grisly hemorrhaging, too much damage has been done. At this point, Democrats’ main hope for the 2012 presidential election is that Republicans nominate another hopelessly feeble candidate. Given the GOP’s facility for shooting itself in the foot, that may well happen.
I was one of the first conservatives to say that the bloom was quickly falling from the Obama rose and that he wasn’t the indestructible politician that DC-itis-afflicted Republicans thought he was. I was convinced of this because President Obama spoke too often in platitudes. I didn’t see any indication that gravitas fit into the same sentence as his name.
While there’s no doubt that Speaker Pelosi deserves a heaping dose of blame for the Democrats’ demise, it isn’t fair to affix all blame on her for President Obama’s arrogance and lack of gravitas. Those can only be properly affixed to President Obama’s shortcomings.
When the final chapter is written, there’s only truth that will stand out: that the American people rejected President Obama’s and Speaker Pelosi’s radical makeover of the U.S. health care system. They didn’t want a total takeover; they just wanted the things fixed that needed fixing.
Finally, this is proof that sometimes it’s best to “let a good crisis go to waste”, at least if you’re going to use difficult times to go on an ideological spending spree.
Technorati Tags: Mike Pence, Health Care, Reform, Rationing, Deficit-Neutral, Reset, Compromise, President Obama, Speech, Speaker Pelosi, Rahm Emanuel, Crisis, Media Enablers, Democrats, Mike Pence, Conservatism
Cross-posted at LetFreedomRingBlog
September 9th, 2009 at 6:44 am
Pence is indeed correct. And Obama trying to jam this down the throats of Americans isn’t going to work. In fact, the speech should generate enough backlash to finally kill the effort.
Obama continually uses the same five tactics ( http://www.conservativeblog.thewebinfocenter.com/conservative-blog/health-care-reform-speech-obamas-top-five-tactics ) to make his case for health care takeover. The speech this evening is just another rerun of the previous speeches, press conferences and interviews already delivered. Even Chris Mathews and the media lapdogs at CNN should be getting bored.
September 9th, 2009 at 8:30 pm
He can put whatever lipstick on this pig he wants, but the fact is it is still a pig and that pig has big Dumbo ears.
I watched as much of the speech as I could stomach, then got on my computer and watched stuff that really matters - baseball! At least it matters more than all the smooth lies the Jerk-in-Chief was telling.
No wonder he was elected and all his worshippers were sure he was the second coming. He really is smooth (as long as he has his TOTUS).