Our Quote of the Day comes from Glenn Reynolds, who quotes from a Robert Reich column where the former Clinton administration Labor Secretary criticizes Obama and the Democrats for not having an actual healthcare plan in place which then left an opening for health care protesters.
Reynolds writes:
Remember how Bush was supposed to be the idiot who went into Iraq without a plan, while Obama was supposed to be the cool methodical one? But Reich is admitting that despite all the Administration hoopla, there’s still no plan. Or, possibly, that the White House has a plan, but won’t tell us what it is. And yet the people who don’t want to see a bill — some bill, doing who-knows-what — rammed through in the dead of night are somehow the ones who are ignorant and being manipulated. Right.
Read his entire post.
And Reynolds has a point. Healthcare reformers are showing faith in what will emerge…but there is no solid plan in place yet. Its opponents are saying they don’t trust what the Democrats and government will do and since there is no specific solid plan out with tons of details (and chronicled by the media), it makes it easier for people to protest what they think is in it.
One thing is for sure: it’s highly unlikely future policies will be created this way again. Bill and Hillary Clinton may have erred in creating their detailed plan, hammered out in private in the White House, and then dumping it on a Congress that picked it apart until it died and dealt a major blow to Bill Clinton politically and relegated Hilly Clinton to a more traditional first lady role. But the Obama approach — give the broad outlines to Congress and let them hammer it out in committees — was clearly a political bungle. Even if it passes in some form, this isn’t a method that will be cloned. At the least, there will have to be some (serious) fine-tuning.
There is also a growing sense among the new and old media punditry that the Obama political team is perhaps NOT as astute as many hoped and others feared. It’s not exactly Amateur Hour — but it’s sloppy.
And Obama & Co are paying a price.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.