Last Night's Press Conference

Matt Yglesias hates the Washington Post, sort of. I love it. I find it far more interesting to read than the NY Times, because often I feel the political coverage is better, and indeed some of the editorials are ridiculous. It's nice to know what the other side is thinking.

But, when it comes to covering the health care debate, they are doing a great job. With wonderful opinion columnists and a great team of reporters, they are doing things fairly right.

With that in mind, let me tell you about a Press Conference that I only read about.

First, Dan Balz has an excellent take on the optics, from someone whom I consider less in my quasi-liberal echo chamber. He writes

The president will need a sustained public campaign of rhetoric and persuasion to prevent public opinion from sliding farther in the coming weeks and perhaps months of this battle. He will continue to make the public case for health care reform Thursday when he travels to the Cleveland Clinic. As he's done on most days the past two weeks, he will be looking for ways to use the bully pulpit to counteract the growing assertiveness of his Republican critics that no reform is better than what Congress may be brewing.

But he will need to do more as well to push the process forward in Congress. Right now, it's not clear where he is placing his real bets. Is it with the Senate Finance Committee bill that is not yet fully formed but that holds out the possibility of some semblance of bipartisanship? Or will it be with a Democrats-only strategy that forces a bill through with a bare majority, using in the Senate the reconciliation process that would amount to a declaration of war with the Republicans?

Obama wants success above everything else. But he has now begun to put down some more explicit markers about what constitutes success. The question is whether, through public advocacy and legislative diplomacy, he can now pull off a victory that has eluded so many other presidents.

Balz does a good job laying out how difficult this process is. The President can only do so much, but now he has started and must continue to lay down markers, while balancing carefully some tricky political waters in Congress.

That said, it was not the press conference that was exciting, but rather an interview with Fred Hiatt of the Washington Post earlier in the day. First, you should read the whole interview. Anyone who wants to understand where Obama is coming from would actually find this more illuminating than the presser last night.

That said, as Jon Cohn states, some things are still on the table, and not dead. First, the President thinks some sort of independent body with some ability to enact Medicare change is still on the table. Second, the President is open to the inclusion of employer sponsored insurance (ESI) under I.R.C. § 61 (and eliminating parts of I.R.C. § 105) also known as the exclusion from income. I have talked about this matter before, and will bring it up again in a separate post.

Another good analysis comes from Merideth Hughes at New America. She shows how much is already in the House bill that could help improve our value, and how the last two major CBO changes could help.

The post also has two excellent stories from yesterday and this morning. The first is about the individual mandate. More and more people support it. Such mandates are necessary for creating a broad risk pool that make health insurance exchanges work. These mandates also have a lovely tinge of personal responsibility attached to it.

The second is how business is divided. While the Chamber of Commerce rails against the employer mandates, large companies have started to support them, and even local chambers are split on the matter.

With a sense of caution, with the AMA behind such legislation, with businesses divided what remains to be done on health care? Well, now comes selling it to the people. Last night's press conference, as Joanne Kenan points out, was one of those moments. But, Obama did not get those ideas from himself. He got them from David Leonhardt of the New York Times, and Steven Perlstein at The Washington Post. I have linked to these columns too and they are worth a read.

Yes, there may be some softening of opinion as a Kaiser Health Tracking poll shows, but overall it is still seen as popular. Overall the public is behind it, and Obama must just reassure the people and help Congress feel safer on the matter (such large reform is NEVER safe). Indeed, the safer route may be to just vote for it if you are a threatened Democrat. As Nate Silver shows, you are screwed if the President's platform fails, because you have now shown yourself and your party to be ineffective. If it works out though, and you passed it, you have something at least to hang your hat on.

Finally too there is always the concern about the timeout announced by Harry Reid. I agree with Nate Silver's other posting too, that there really are too many positive factors going forward. I may be overly confident and positive, but I really think that this is the case with all these other signs I cited/linked to in my own piece here.

The question is that if the public cannot support something like this now, I wonder if we can ever achieve something worthwhile on the issue.