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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Katelew who wrote (131495)	2/25/2010 5:19:00 PM
From: Dale Baker	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 540985

From the coverage I am reading, this is the crux of the problem: Sen. Lamar Alexander (Tenn.), speaking for the Republicans, said, "We want you to succeed, because if you succeed, our country succeeds." But he said Republicans want to "change the direction" that Obama is pursuing, scuttle the bills already passed by the House and Senate and aim for less ambitious reforms. "This is a car that can't be recalled and fixed," Alexander said of the legislation, "and we have to start over." ============================================================== If you are negotiating a document with someone and all they can say is, tear up the proposed draft, start from scratch and do nothing beyond our suggested incremental moves, then a negotiation over a broad plan is moot. If nothing else, today made clear what the Reps are for and what the Dems are for. In other democracies, parties decide what they are for then try to get that passed. The voters put them there to do that. I hope that after today, this "scrap it all and start over at our lowest common denominator" goes to the scrap heap itself. It's not how governments tackle major problems. Imagine if we had tackled civil rights like that. =========================================================== Republicans reject mandating the purchase of insurance and have advanced an alternative that would cover 3 million people at a cost of $61 billion. Obama asked Republicans to say whether they wanted to cover more people and, if so, to explain how they would do so. He observed that he did not get an answer.

To: Katelew who wrote (131495)	2/25/2010 5:55:48 PM
From: JohnM	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 540985

But too many sob stories came out of the Dems. I was hoping for a different level of debate. I agree on the stories but it is precisely what I expected. So I wasn't surprised by that. I was actually surprised that Obama was actually able to hold something of a substantive debate in the midst of far too many campaign speeches. His exchanges with Tom Coburn and Paul Ryan were quite good. And his ability to counteract bad portraits of the Dem bill was quite impressive. Generally, though, it seemed to me that the Rs did have ideas, did have legitimate concerns, and seemed as a group to have given more thought to the nuts and bolts of things. It could be, though, that some of their assumptions need to be fact-checked. To some degree I agree about the Dems but that was because their ideas were in the bill and Obama was making the case, very well, for those. Having said that, however, Tom Harkin, Dick Durbin, Kent Conrad, all had interesting things to say. As for the Reps, I'm back to what I've already said. Coburn had some interesting things. Ryan is definitely a political comer, bright and articulate and Alexander gave a powerful opening. But as for the rest, I didn't see any ideas.