White House Done With Wilson

[babylonsister]

White House Done With Wilson

by Richard Wolffe


The White House hits the road for health care reform, and speaks out—proclaiming the town-hall meetings didn’t matter, branding the Wilson flap as “a pimple on the ass of progress.”

With his big health-care speech behind him, President Obama and his senior aides are mapping his fall strategy. A time-honored White House dilemma looms: Should he spend most of his time rallying the public, or twisting arms and slapping backs on Capitol Hill?

Obama’s senior team has chosen to deploy the president on the road for the moment, but they concede that he will also need to lobby for congressional votes himself from the Oval Office—even if all that really matters is the votes of a handful of up-for-grabs centrists in the Senate. “In terms of his personal time, we have got a lot of events coming up, but it’s obviously going to be a multifaceted deal,” said one senior White House aide. “He and others will be working the congressional side. It is just a handful of votes at this point, but the handful could be important.”

Conventional wisdom has it that the president and his team lost August, when cable TV went wall-to-wall with reports on town-hall forums erupting with constituents upset with the president’s plans for health-care reform. But Obama’s team sees it slightly differently. “If you look at the polling, we didn’t lose ground in August,” a senior Obama adviser said. “We lost it in July and June, when Congress was in town.”

That might seem an academic distinction; after all, the headline about the polls was Obama’s approval ratings went down, significantly. But in this adviser’s view, the town-hall dramas didn’t take the toll everybody think they did; rather, the outbursts were largely politically irrelevant. “I don’t think the protesters hurt us,” the senior adviser said. “We’ve done three town-hall meetings and they were all fine.”

In fact, the White House is more than ready to brush aside the now-infamous protest of Rep. Joe Wilson of South Carolina, who yelled at the president during his televised address. “I think this is a pimple on the ass of progress,” said the senior adviser.

more...

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-09-11/white-house-blasts-wilson/

[lapfog_1]

1. This could be a mistake.

Not that the President can't make a great case for the cause...

But because he doesn't (unlike Bush) hand pick the audience. Now emboldened by the August town halls (where being uncivil to your congresspersons and Senators became an art form), and by the example of Joe Wilson doing the same to the President while in a special session of Congress, the teabaggers will try to do the same to the President when he speaks. Shouting him down, disrupting the speech, and the focus of the nightly news segments.


Whatever points the President will try to make (and they are sure to be repetitive to his masterful speech to the Congress) will be drowned out by a few idiots and the continued effort to de-legitimize his Presidency. That will become the news cycle and we will never win. The cranks and malcontents will be interviewed endlessly, and lionized by the GOP who will take the opportunity to chime in with comments like "the people are really upset with this socialism that the President proposes" and "there is a ground swell of fear over this health care takeover by big government" blah, blah, blah. August all over again, only this time the target of the hate won't be Congressperson XXX but the President of the United States.

[islandmkl]

2. find a replay of the event yesterday...not the DC thing, the Minnesota speech...

this ain't your local congressman with a couple of hundred people, where 20 loudmouths can dictate the atmosphere....

Barack-to-the-people is probably the best way to PROMOTE the message...he is a master at speaking directly to the People...which puts a great amount of pressure on his opponents while at the same time increasing his favorability quotient...

it's easy for idiots to yell at some local congressperson, when they have some major percentage of the crowd...yesterday's DC event showed the teabaggers ability to actually DRAW A CROWD...20 or 30 or 100 a-holes in a crowd of 10 or 20 thousand aren't going to get anywhere...except rejected and probably ejected...