Weiner On Health Care's Demise: We Lacked Leadership From Obama

[sabrina 1]

Source: Huffington Post

At least one leading House progressive is blaming the White House for the likely death of health care legislation, arguing that President Obama never forcefully made the case for reform.

Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) told the Huffington Post on Tuesday evening that, with some difficulty, he believed that passing a bill in the immediate future was not likely to happen. Part of the problem, the New York Democrat insisted, was that House Democrats no longer believed that the rest of their agenda was contingent on health care's passage.

"I don't think people are buying it as much as they were," said Weiner. "We have been asked to accept as an article of faith that success on health care was a building block for anything else we do all year. And I think increasingly my colleagues are saying: 'Really? I think we can bounce back OK if we move on from it for now.'"

> snip

"Obama's kind of populist thing on taxing the banks, I wish we had seen a little bit of that on health care. He hasn't been really willing to do that. If he went around and did a push on the public option three or four months ago, I don't know," he said. "If he would have been in Nebraska and just given some cover. Go to the University of Nebraska and say to the same 20,000 kids he spoke to during the campaign, 'Look, I need you again and here is what this is about.' Because look, I believe on the merits it was the right thing to do. And then you have the added value that it turned out whenever we talked about it, it was popular."

Read more: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/20/weiner-on-health-cares-de_n_429540.html

---

The loss of the Senate seat in Mass seems to have released a lot of the frustration Democrats like Weiner, who publicly had supported the Senate bill, felt about a bill that had so little of what Progressives in Congress had hoped for.

I think they now realize just how unpopular it was and are no longer willing to just toe the party line on something that as so many people tried to warn them about, was political suicide. Better it happened with this one special election, than in November after the bill had passed and cost the Democrats their majority.