Barack Obama: All Politics All the Time

This was the header on the NY Times Midwest edition: Health Meeting Fails to Bridge Partisan Rift. (The online version is different.) What the photo perhaps inadvertently illustrates is that the rift is among Democrats.

Our President Barack Obama may make smug and cheap cracks at the expense of Sen. John McCain, gloating over his own election victory, but with a majority in both houses of Congress he and his party failed to achieve agreement on healthcare reform. (And he failed to address the point Sen. McCain raised about the reaction of Americans to the porky special deal people in Florida or other favored states got.) So what now? As the WSJ notes:

A bipartisan health-care consensus will remain elusive after yesterday's marathon summit, as expected, though viewers who stuck out the full seven-plus hours could be forgiven for wondering what happened to all the liberals. General anesthesia? To listen to President Obama and his closest Democratic allies, you'd think John McCain had won the election and their bill had been drafted by Paul Ryan, Tom Coburn and the scholars at the American Enterprise Institute. Yet the reality is that there is a vast philosophical and policy gulf on health care in Washington. Everyone agrees there are severe problems in the health-care markets. The disagreement is over solutions.

The President had no answer to Rep. Paul Ryan's laying out the case against one-size-fits-all healthcare--that the answers don't lie in Washington, and his (RCP video) expose of the fraudulent assumptions the Dems have used to hide the bill's real, staggering pricetag.Barack Obama is all politics all the time--and he hasn't even persuaded his fellow Dems to fall in line with his brand of it. We can quote Honest Abe too, Mr. President.

Perhaps they will ram this thing through after all. But most Americans will see it as a nakedly political power grab--on a matter of life or death for them. The lack of consensus is a bright light indicator that there is a lack of confidence in this president's solutions--or lack of them. And all the dead sister's teeth stories in the world won't change that.

More. Dr. Tom Coburn rebuttal to the president.