08 September 2009

Our post-partisan healer

In a speech today, President Obama demanded that the health care debate end immediately.

It's kind of tough to kill the national discourse on a topic when you are scheduled to deliver a primetime address to a joint session of Congress tomorrow night, Mr. President.

The link above tells you everything you need to know.

First, it's impossible for the debate to end, if for no other reason than because the president still hasn't actually put forth any sort of concrete proposal yet. If he supports the House liberals' bill that has been skewered over and over, he should say so. Otherwise, he should actually tell the American people what this vague notion of "health care reform" entails.

I honestly don't get it.

By the way, two speakers who took the stage before the president today called for a public option.

Second, the reason the president wants to kill the debate is because he is simply unable to face critics head-on. As we noted here, his speeches are populated with straw men, as he ascribes to all opponents the characteristics and beliefs of the fringe right. In reality, 84% of Americans are satisfied with the health care they receive, and they are rightfully skeptical of the Pelosi-Reid far-left manifesto. The opposition to the liberal-led attempted overhaul of the health care system is not just from the fringe, and the president is either intentionally ignoring that in his speeches, or is patently stupid.

Is this really transparency? Is this really change we can believe in? Is this really a post-partisan utopia becoming self-evident?

Said Charles Krauthammer:

"For a man who only recently bred a cult, ordinariness is a great burden, and for his acolytes, a crushing disappointment. Obama has become a politician like others. And like other flailing presidents, he will try to salvage a cherished reform -- and his own standing -- with yet another primetime speech.

"But for the first time since election night in Grant Park, he will appear in the most unfamiliar of guises -- a mere mortal, a treacherous transformation to which a man of Obama's supreme self-regard may never adapt."

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