President Obama: Unsure healthcare ‘gaps can be bridged’ (Dem versus Rep)
President Barack Obama spent the morning fending off GOP charges that his health care bill was a deal-ridden monstrosity that needs to be scrapped, even tangling testily with his 2008 presidential rival John McCain.
“We’re not campaigning anymore, John,” Obama said at one point during the White House health summit, after McCain listed a litany of deals included in the bill. “The election is over now.”
McCain joked, “I’m reminded of that every day.”
Obama replied, “We can spend the remainder of the time with our respective talking points, but we’re supposed to be talking about insurance.”
The exchange also captured Obama’s strategy on display at the summit — to accuse the Republicans of being only interested in scoring political points, while lacking any serious plan to provide health insurance for all Americans.
By the lunch break, it was growing clearer that the pre-summit pessimism on both sides – that there was little to no hope of grand bipartisan compromise – was on target. In fact, both sides spent the bulk of the first three hours of the session trying to score tactical points, rarely veering from their scripts to extend a hand to the other side.
Obama, who called the summit as a last-ditch effort to resuscitate his stalled reform effort, left no illusion that bipartisan comity would be easy to come by, after a year of bitter sparring between the parties on the Democratic plan.
Read more at Politico
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