This was not a home-run kind of speech; he was trying to leg this one out, and say a lot of different things to satisfy a lot of different constituencies. But I think it was a stand-up triple.
DiA:
I know we're way past the point of no return on this, but it's still maddening that we insist on discussing a debate about health care in the language of health insurance. If you have a pre-existing condition, whatever else the mechanism by which your care is funded might be, it is not insurance. Also annoying: The suggestion that people who get sick without coverage are "imposing" their costs on us because we have made a collective decision to provide care for them.
[T]he line every pundit will talk about is the GOP congressman — reportedly Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC) — who yelled "lie" during the first part of the president's speech. It was so astoundingly rude that it's almost certain to backfire and will give the president a few extra approval points among the American public.
Obama says he doesn't want to demonize insurance companies–he just wants to hold them accountable. This is the best line of the night.
Jonathan Cohn picks out what Obama has not said before:
Obama makes clear that health reform should cost about $900 billion. He's put that much money on the table before, but it wasn't clear whether he would try to seek more funding. Clearly he won't.
Mike Madden thought comparing the public option to public universities was shrewd:
It was a far better metaphor than the one he's used earlier this summer, comparing the public option to the Postal Service and private insurers to FedEx and UPS. (For one thing, the post office might conjure up visions of long waits for service.) So many Americans have attended public colleges that it's hard for opponents to say they don't do exactly what Obama said they do — provide an alternative, without inhibiting private colleges. If advocates for the public option are smart, you might be hearing this comparison a lot in the next few days.
JPod (unsurprisingly) was not impressed:
[It] was nearly an hour of snake-oil salesmanship, promises that cannot possibly be kept, and false invocations of bipartisan civility even as he was trying to deliver partisan roundhouses of his own.
[At] the end, came the rousing defense of liberalism I was waiting for. For a speech in which he was trying to forge a consensus this was a brave and risky move. You can say to that vast middle of Americans nervous about their own health insurance plans: “There, there, don’t worry, things will be good for you.” And just stop there. Or you can go one step further and move them to a higher plane, which is what he did: “When fortune turns against one of us, others are willing to lend a helping hand."
After an August in which the health care debate threatened to drive into a ditch, President Obama tried to steer it back into the center lane, if there is such a thing to be found on an endeavor so ambitious as remaking one-sixth of the economy. He defended the public option, and yet downplayed it. The package that he described is about the size of the framework released yesterday by Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus–$900 billion, which is the lower limit of what anyone is estimated that it would take over the next decade. And though he is not likely to get more than one or two GOP votes, Obama went out of his way to point out the ideas in his plan that can trace their parentage to the Republicans–including his former adversary, John McCain. And he laid on the table an issue that has been something of the Holy Grail to the right: tort reform.
I thought it was much more focused on the 535 elected officials in the room than any joint speech I'd seen. It kind of felt more like a Roosevelt Room talk than a speech to the country. A lot of process. That said, the Kennedy riff was powerful and the portrayal of Kennedy as bipartisan leader was pretty brilliant. The line about government bureaucrats and insurance bureaucrats was a good conflation. Was it enough? I don't know. I don't think we'll know for awhile.
(Photo: Brendan Smialowski/Getty.)
The Dish 