In the wake of the White House’s acknowledgement that the public-option proposal was not ‘essential’ to the president’s health care reform legislation, Howard Dean, former-governor of Vermont and former-chairman of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), advised President Obama and Congressional Democrats to punt the issue of health care reform to another time and space. “You can’t really have reform without a public option,” Dean said on CBS News’s The Early Show. “If you don’t want to have the public option, … just do a little insurance reform … and then we’ll tackle health reform another time. But let’s not pretend we’re doing reform without a public option.”
Does this mean that the Democratic leadership is truly sounding the retreat on the issue of health care reform? Hardly! Democratic political strategist Lex Luthor … umm, James Carville was so giddy with the prospect of dusting off the tired ol’ ‘It’s the Republicans’ fault’ campaign cliché that he let the cat out of the bag a little early on CNN’s State of the Union program. “Put a bill out there, make them filibuster it, make them be what they are, the party of no,” Carville said. “Let them kill it. Let them kill it with the interest group money, then run against them. That’s what we ought to do.”
Not to be outdone, Dean went on The Stephanie Miller Show, a progressive radio program (yes, apparently they do still exist, though certainly few and far between) to suggest that conservatives not only wanted to kill the bill, but also kill the president.
“The Republicans, they have no interest in this Bill. They’re using the 1994 playbook. Let’s kill the bill and kill the president…… or, kill the president’s term. Although there are sort of angry people out there I get very nervous about this stuff. I don’t like it at all”
Had Dean pulled a Sebelius and simply ‘misspoke’ or was he suggesting that conservative/Republican opponents of the public-option health care bill want Obama dead?
Brian Maloney at The Radio Equalizer has a transcript of the interview as well as the actual audio from the program:
Yep, this isn’t about power; this isn’t about control. President Obama and the Congressional Democratic leadership truly believe the health care system in the United States is broken so badly it is beyond repair and therefore must be completely overhauled. They believe this so profoundly that they are willing to lie down and let Republicans kill it, thus leaving thousands, if not millions, more Americans to die under the current system (a claim they have made repeatedly throughout this summer’s health care debate) rather then compromise.
