Is Obama Listening To The Wrong People or Not Listening At All? (Updated!)

by Kathleen McKinley | March 10, 2010 11:58 am

Part of Obama’s appeal was his intelligence. I may have thought him wrong on the issues, but still intelligent. I am starting to question that.

Rasmussen’s latest daily poll shows Obama now at 43% approval, with 56% disapproving, the lowest figures of his presidency.

It took Pres. George Bush almost six years to get to this level of job approval. Pres. Obama’s has managed it in 14 months.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out why. He insists on pushing and pushing an upopular healthcare bill. Not too long ago he said he would focus on creating jobs. But then he went right back to the health care boondoggle.

Why? Because the White House has convinced themselves that passing this bill will be win for them. They have spent a year of political capital on this, and as a White House source recently said, “This is the last helicopter out of Saigon.” They imagine that, like most bills, once it’s passed all bad blood will blow over, and people will shrug their shoulders and move on.

But this isn’t like most bills. This isn’t like most times. Our economy is in trouble, and unemployment has skyrocketed. We are literally printing money to pay for things. The last thing this economy needs is a big new entitlement program. We simply cannot afford it. The tea party movement is not going to let anyone forget what they are doing right now. Obama is not thinking straight.

If Obama had been governing as he promised, he would have gotten leaders from both parties from the start, and worked out a health care compromise where the bill contained only those things in which both sides agreed upon. Sure, it wouldn’t have been exactly what the left or right wanted, but he would have had the bi-partisan bill he claimed to have wanted, and he could have easily passed it. Instead he let people like Pelosi create a bill so radical that even members of her own party refused to vote for it. Obama let special interests and special deals be a part of the process, when he promised they wouldn’t be.

It’s a shame we didn’t get the change we were promised.

And now, with jobs being what should be priority one, he is still campaigning on this health care bill. Either he isn’t as smart as we thought, or he is listening to the wrong people.

Update: It would be amusing if it weren’t so important to defeat this thing, but the Democrats are trying such unprecedented maneuvers to get this through, it has many scratching their heads on what the rules actually are.

From the NYT:[1]

The White House and Democratic Congressional leaders said Tuesday that they were bracing for a key procedural ruling that could complicate their effort to approve major health care legislation, by requiring President Obama to sign the bill into law before Congress could revise it through an expedited budget process.
……………………….

But Senator Kent Conrad, Democrat of North Dakota and chairman of the Budget Committee, said the reconciliation instructions in last year’s budget resolution seemed to require that Mr. Obama sign the Senate bill into law before it could be changed.

“It’s very hard to see how you draft, and hard to see how you score, a reconciliation bill to another bill that has not yet been passed and become law,” Mr. Conrad said. “I just advise you go read the reconciliation instructions and see if you think it has been met if it doesn’t become law.”

Another obstacle is that ever present abortion funding language. Remember Obama said it would NOT be in there. But of course if they pass the bill in it’s present form, it will be. What they are trying to do is promise Democrat Rep.Stupak that after it’s passed they will take the funding out in reconciliation. But Stupak is saying he will not accept some kind of “letter” promising to do that, because it’s simply not binding.

If you had told me 10 yrs ago that a pro life Democrat was going to stick up for the principles of life against his party like this, I would have laughed at you. I thought the pro life mentality could never make it in the Democratic party. I can’t tell you how wonderful it is to be wrong about that.

Endnotes:
  1. NYT:: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/10/health/policy/10health.html

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