Playing Dumb On Gruber, Obama Is Busted By His Own Wonkiness
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By THOMAS McARDLE 11/18/2014
"Revenge of the Wonks" might be a good name for the Gruber/ObamaCare fiasco, or maybe "The Wonk-in-Chief's Comeuppance."
White House press secretary Josh Earnest on Tuesday claimed that ObamaCare/RomneyCare co-architect Jonathan Gruber's videotaped remarks about pulling the wool over the eyes of the "stupid" American people "are not views that are shared by anybody at the White House."
Unfortunately for Earnest and the president, yet another video has come back to haunt the administration. In it, Obama himself in 2006 boasts at a Brookings Institution conference that "some of the brightest minds from academia and policy circles" the liberal think tank had made use of were people "I've stolen ideas from liberally, people ranging from Robert Gordon to Austan Goolsbee, Jon Gruber …"
Busted!
Gordon would later help design the education portion of Obama's non-stimulating stimulus; Goolsbee became Council of Economic Advisers chairman. Both, obviously, were major Obama consultants before and after his election as president.
So was Gruber. He took part in 19 meetings in the White House, including in the Oval Office with the president, as Gruber has boasted. But without batting an eyelash, Obama this week calls him "some adviser who never worked on our staff" -- and, by the way, being away in Australia at the G20, the president only "just heard about this" GruberGate stuff.
"We had a yearlong debate" in the public eye on ObamaCare, Obama says; Earnest dismisses GruberGate as returning to "the political fights from 2009 and 2010."
But the majority of Americans opposed Obama's government takeover of the health system five years ago when it was passed by legislative chicanery and taxpayer-funded bribes for fence-sitting lawmakers, like the Cornhusker Kickback, the Louisiana Purchase, and the Gator Aid. That's why history was made when then-tea party-backed Republican Scott Brown took Ted Kennedy's Senate seat in bluer-than-blue Massachusetts in early 2010. Even fewer like ObamaCare today — only 37%, according to Gallup.
The proudly wonkish then-Sen. Obama dropped Gruber's name to show off before the Brookings crowd.
But today, Gruber is just one element of his convenient ObamaCare amnesia.
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