Oh no he didn't! What happened to "every day we delay, Americans are dying"?
What the hell is wrong with Obama? Why does he always choose accommodation over moral action?
And his lack of leadership is getting downright scary. Congress is fumbling through a game of charades, trying to figure out the clues, while it becomes increasingly clear: There's no game plan.
WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama says "we should take our time" getting to a final health care bill.
He said Thursday he wants to go through the legislation in detail with Republicans to examine their ideas and Democratic ideas to see whether there are better ways to improve the nation's health care system than have already been proposed.
Sure. Because those dying people? They're not going anywhere!
Obama said that letting some time pass before calling for a vote also will allow "everybody to get the real facts."
Or, as is more likely, it will give the insurance industry time to gather their forces for one final game-winning attack.
The president spoke to donors and supporters of his political organization, Organizing for America, one of a handful of fundraisers he was headlining Thursday for Democrats.
Obama said it is most urgent to focus now on a jobs package, but that health care must be addressed afterward.
But a fed-up Sen. Al Franken (who's getting a reputation for being "difficult," bless his heart) took David Axelrod to task at a "tense" closed-door meeting with the Democratic caucus today:
Five sources who were in the room tell POLITICO that Franken criticized Axelrod for the administration’s failure to provide clarity or direction on health care and the other big bills it wants Congress to enact.
The sources said Franken was the most outspoken senator in the meeting, which followed President Barack Obama’s question-and-answer session with Senate Democrats at the Newseum on Wednesday. But they also said the Minnesotan wasn’t the only angry Democrat in the room.
“There was a lot of frustration in there,” said a Democratic senator who declined to be identified.
“People were hot,” another Democratic senator said.
Democratic senators are frustrated that the White House hasn’t done more to win over the public on health care reform and other aspects of its ambitious agenda — and angry that, in the wake of Scott Brown’s win in the Massachusetts Senate race, the White House hasn’t done more to chart a course for getting a health care bill to the president’s desk.
In his public session with the senators Wednesday, Obama urged them to “finish the job” on health care but did not lay out a path for doing so. That uncertainty appeared to trigger Franken’s wrath, and the sources in the room said he laid out his concerns much more directly than any senator did in the earlier public session.
