Presidential Speech and the Public Option

I was surprised to see a long string of Huffington Post bloggers above Sirota’s blog, gushing over the speech. I hope their applause helps the President getting some kind of reform.

I too join them in giving kudos to the speechwriter for a well crafted speech and the President for delivering it with a perfect balance of emotion and forcefulness.

However, I am surprised these bloggers aside from David Sirota did not notice the mealy-mouthed handling of the Public Option and its importance as the only reliable way to achieve the very objectives promised in this eloquent speech.

I am thankful to David for bringing to fore, the holes in the  substance part of the speech. My comments talk to the concern about President’s ambiguity about the importance of Public Option to his vision of the HCR bill.

I do not know what Snowe found annoying about the President’s weak positioning of Public Option, as a condiment instead of the main dish or even a side dish, of something as vital to the success of Real Reform as PO. This shift from President’s full-throated defense of the Public Option in his press conferences, is to win over Snowe & Co and President’s own Stray Dogs.

I think it was an opportunity missed to use the bully pulpit to convince the American public of the importance of PO as a component critical to achieving Real Reform.

President continued to repeat his very recent ritual of publicly cutting the legs of the Public Option ostensibly to court GOP votes, appease his own Stray Dogs and Health Inc. He claimed PO was only one additional feature. There may be other ideas to replace it. He has no further evidence than before that the objectives above can be achieved by any other means, yet he did not want to sell it to the American public. May be I am missing something about a political stratagem President is after.

President also failed to clearly connect the pathetic plight of many Americans to his solutions. Also did not tell them honestly the time table of when the relief will come to the blighted. Like 4 years to an exchange. 4 years from 2013? From today?

Progressives should not think PO is the only way, it is just one means. They should be open to other ideas. Mr P, have you not been open for months now? What do you have to show? Belittling the Public Option and the Progressives as extreme left who are stuck on this one idea. Is this a way to display your post-paritsanship? I did not know that a compromise from Single Payer to making the Public Plan Optional is some kind of extreme left philosophy (horror of horrors some one labels him as a socialist). Do you think this approach will unite your stray dogs and right wing saboteurs to support a sham bill to put a feather in The Democratic Party cap.

Mr P we have all bought into the importance of your three core objectives and your touching empathy for 14000 losing insurance every day and hundreds dying and going bankrupt. What I do not see is your commitment to selling and pushing the only real means to get there, i.e. the Public Option. I do not see you showing clearly how you will take care of the blighted, you so eloquently described in the campaign and continue to do so, in a timely and effective (in terms of $ & c from their pockets) way. Imagine the number of people losing their insurance, 14000*1400, tens may be hundreds of thousands dying or going bankrupt while waiting for 2013.