Fooling history
If you are anything like me, you stared at the Health Care vote numbers on C-Span (because nobody could have sat through Geraldo on Fox) and wondered, why in the world is that ‘1′ under Republican and ‘Aye” why in the world would any Republican vote for this travesty of a bill?
Well, the answer seems to be that President Obama and the White House put a full court press on Congressman Anh Cao similar to the one that they had utilized successfully on Senator Snowe. According to Cao he had several meetings with President Obama and White House staff in the weeks leading up to the vote.
Cao was the only Republican to back the House bill Saturday night. He told Fox News that he bucked his party out of a sense of obligation for his district, which encompasses most of New Orleans.
“My vote was a vote of conscience,” Cao said. “Whether or not it was a popular vote for the party is of little relevance to me.”
But Cao said the Obama administration invested considerable time in him. He said President Obama spoke with him for “a period of a couple weeks” and that Obama’s staff spoke with him “on a number of occasions.”
The final pitch came Saturday around noon, when Obama called Cao and apparently offered assurances that he would help economic recovery in his district, which is mostly minority and poor. Obama got 75 percent of the votes in Cao’s district in last November’s presidential election.
“We were able to sit down to talk about recovery, to talk about the needs of the district,” Cao told Fox News, though he said no “promises” were made. “The administration and I, we have a very great relationship.”
Okay, courting the opposing party and influencing a vote are just politics as usual, and both understandable and foregiveable. It is not the result of the campaign, but the importance of it that I call into question. Why can the President invest time in romancing the vote for his Health Care program, but not in devising a campaign for defeating our enemies in Afganistan? Why is passing a Health Care bill which will supposedly not REALLY go into effect until after Obama’s next election (you have no idea how hard typing that was) more important than jobs? It seems senseless to me.
It has been said many times that what happens to our politicians is that we send them off to Washington full of hope and promise and they quickly become part of the problem. This happens when lobbyists and other influence peddlers flash rolls of cash or whatever in front of them. Then they not only become corrupt, but they fall into the Washington trap of worrying 1st and foremost about their next election.
But that does not seem to be Obama’s main issue (notice I said main issue) . Obama seems to have fallen into the 2nd trap of policticans. Beyond worrying about their next election, politicians also worry about their ‘legacy’ and how history is going to remember them. This seems to be the trap that Obama has fallen into, and unfortunately he has fallen into it hard and fast. Never in my memory or my personal research of history has a president been more worried about legacy this early in his tenure. Obama has reached a level of narcissism that is above and beyond any “Imperial Presidency” of the past.
You could be forgiven for assuming that President Obama skipped the Berlin Wall ceremony as he and his staff could not think of a way to 1) Get out of praising Reagan (although the left wing media has done a pretty good job of it) and 2) Made it all about him, which he seems to manage about everything else.
But I don’t think we see the real picture of the President’s agenda by what he doesn’t do but by observing what he does do, and therby shows as important to him.
Take the seduction of Cao and Snowe, Obama had plenty of time for that, and for what? To obtain a grand total of ‘1′ Republican vote in the Senate and ‘1′ in the House? That was really worth all that time and effort? How? Even if you agree with the rather fuzzy math that the administration uses to describe the fate of those who lack health insurance (11,000 – 18,000 deaths per year) how does this daleance with two Republican party members (RINOS or not) save so much as one life? So rather than work on getting American’s jobs, or defeating our enemies it was more important to devote time, energy and resources to achieve a meaningless vote on a pet bill so that Robert Gibbs could claim that it was a bi-partisan bill? Shame on you Mr. President, who is this supposed to fool, Posterity?