health care summit

In his opening statement at the health care summit, President Obama mentioned his nightly routine. Each day, his staff selects ten letters sent to the White House from around the country and delivers them to the Oval Office. Obama then takes them up to the residence when he leaves for the day. The president mentioned that a lot of those letters call for health care reform. No problem with that. But it's also worth noting that there are plenty of other letters being sent to the White House urging the president to drop the current legislation and focus instead on his economic program. At least, that's what we can infer from the polls. How many of those letters does Reggie Love give the president to read? Probably not many.

We all search out information and arguments that confirm our biases. That's human nature. But to defeat those biases, we need constantly to engage with arguments against our position, and to treat them seriously. And when you don't do that, you end up in a political predicament like the one the Democrats are in today.

At tomorrow's "health summit," we'll hear a lot of talk from President Obama and congressional Democrats about unscrupulous and under-regulated insurers who pad their obscene profits by raising prices at their whim at the expense of helpless Americans from coast to coast.  If only the federal government were as fiscally constrained as insurers.  As I detail in a longer post over at NRO, of all the grossly false claims that underlie ObamaCare, this one might well take the cake.

Andrew Malcolm writes:

Many political observers are coming to see that the ex-state senator from the South Side is running his federal administration in Washington much the way they run things back home: with a small....

...claque of clout-laden people from the same school who learned their political trade back in the nation's No. 3 city, named for an Indian word for a smelly wild onion.

That style is tough, focused, immune to any distractions but cosmetic niceties. And did we mention tough. A portly, veteran Chicago alderman once confided only about 40% jokingly, that he had taken up jogging to lose weight but quickly gave it up as boring because "you can't knock anyone down." That's politics the Chicago way.

Obama and his top advisers Rahm Emanuel, Valerie Jarrett, and David Axelrod all hail from the Chicago school. Press secretary Robert Gibbs is an Alabaman who worked for North Carolinian Democrats, but he's adapted to the Chicago method with ease. Together, this band of operatives has not deviated from the themes and goals of Obama's 2008 campaign. They do not admit errors of substance. Faced with a troublesome midterm election, Obama did not search out new figures and guides for his party. He reached back to his 2008 campaign manager David Plouffe.