Bloodthirsty Liberal

If liberal health-care reform is going to make people better off, why does it require “a very harsh, stiff penalty” to make everyone buy it? That’s what Senator Obama called it in his Presidential campaign when he opposed the individual mandate supported by Hillary Clinton. He correctly argued then that many people were uninsured not because they didn’t want coverage but because it was too expensive.

From today’s WSJ.

And check out these haters at a health care rally today:

Oh wait, they’re pro-health care. Can’t be racists, then. Sorry.

But he can:

“The Baucus bill is the worst piece of healthcare legislation I’ve seen in 30 years. … In fact, it’s a $60 billion giveaway to the health insurance industry every year. … It was written by healthcare lobbyists, so that’s not a surprise. It’s an outrage.”

…

“I’m glad Senator Rockefeller is not going to vote for it. I wouldn’t vote for it at all under any circumstances.”

That’s Howard Dean, expressing his inner James Earl Ray. Will someone please check with Janeane Garofalo on who is racist and who is not? I’m so confused.

Hell hath no fury like a party chairman scorned:

Barack Obama chucked Dean out of his DNC chairmanship. Adding insult to injury, PBO denied the good doctor any role in his health care initiative. Now, it’s payback time. Subbing for Keith Olbermann on this evening’s Countdown, Dean depicted Obama as a loser in the health care fight. For good measure, he flung a famous Obama campaign slogan back in the prez’s face.

Here was Dean in his show opening monologue.

HOWARD DEAN: No public option? No employer mandate? Why bother? Is President Obama slowly losing the health care fight?

Later, chatting with Congressman Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), Chair of the Dem Congressional Campaign Committee, Dean dealt the unkindest cut of all.

DEAN: Chris, voters were promised “change they can believe in.” Are you concerned about what may happen to our party in 2010 or 2012 if we don’t get any change at all?

But if Obama has lost a politician turned pundit, he has gained another reporter turned rep:

Daren Briscoe, a Newsweek correspondent who was embedded with Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, has taken a job with the Obama administration, according to an email sent to a listserv of his classmates at the Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.

The email, written by Time reporter and fellow Columbia grad Jay Newton-Small, said Briscoe would be serving as deputy associate director of public affairs for the Office of National Drug Control Policy as of Monday.

“Despite his multiple basketball games with our commander-in-chief, he always brought a skeptical eye to his work and in conversations about the candidate,” Newton-Small wrote the email.

Briscoe’s campaign reporting helped provide the basis for Newsweek’s book on the campaign, A Long Time Coming.

Both of these stories are courtesy of Newsbusters, so let me provide some original content.

We’ve covered stories of other reporters joining the Obama administration here; we covered the revelation that Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter got a contract to write a book about Obama’s first 100 days (as a match for his book on FDR’s first hundred); and we surveyed all the reporters and media institutions who published tie-in books at the time of the inauguration.

Not to mention Chris Matthews’ complete capitulation to Obam-awe (and shock), with his slurred determination to do everything in his power to make this a “sssuccesshful preshidency” [hic!].

They’ve already told us who they are, in other words, the only thing up for negotiation is the price.

Have you heard of a group called The New Agenda?

This is a group of “high-powered” (that must be why they didn’t invite me) Clinton supporters who are taking a very long and broad view of the primary season and the treatment of Hillary Clinton. I mentioned Bad News. The Bad News is that a recent Pew poll found that almost a third of Clinton primary voters won’t vote for Obama - especially older women. They are ticked-off about the media/pundit misogyny and the lack of response from the DNC. Huh. That sounds a little like yours truly. I remember writing some pretty angry posts late last winter and early last spring as I listened to comments around the size of her rear end, the color of her pantsuits, the quality of her laugh… I believe they called it a “cackle” once too often.

Thing is, it’s no longer about Hillary for many of them. I sat in on a group of high-powered Clinton supporters gathering in New York last week to create a nonpartisan group called The New Agenda. There was little discussion of the current campaign.

The New Agenda’s agenda is to look out for women’s political interests where the Democratic Party and old-line feminist organizations had failed. The attendees reserved special fury for the Democratic National Committee and its passivity before the misogynistic carnival. One of their specifics is getting MSNBC jester Chris Matthews fired — and if he intends to run for the Senate from Pennsylvania, to end that idea.

Every member has her own plans for November, including for a few, voting for Obama. Co-founder Amy Siskind, a former Wall Street exec and Clinton fundraiser, told me, “I won’t vote for Obama, but I’m not sure what I’ll do.” Cynthia Ruccia, a Democratic activist from Columbus, Ohio, who twice ran against Republican John Kasich, is supporting McCain — and organizing other Democrats in her swing state to do likewise.

The McCain camp has noticed. Carly Fiorina, former CEO of Hewlett-Packard and McCain’s adviser, met with Siskind in New York. She flew to Columbus to confer with Ruccia, Nancy Hopkins, another New Agenda founder, and 75 other miffed Democratic women. (Hopkins is the MIT biologist who famously protested a suggestion by then-Harvard University President Lawrence Summers that boys might be innately better at science than girls.)

DNC chairman Howard Dean has called Ruccia twice. “He was just waking up to the thought that women around the country were upset over the treatment of Hillary,” she told me. Ruccia tends to doubt that putting Clinton’s name to a roll-call vote will mollify many of the female holdouts. “The train left the station a long time ago,” she said.

There’s more, worth a read. I so hope that we don’t blink come November.

- Aggie