If Ezra Klein is to be believed, this is irrelevant:

This time, the President is going to be specific. Next week, President Obama is going to give Democrats a health care plan they can begin to sell. He plans to list specific goals that any health insurance reform plan that arrives at his desk must achieve, according to Democratic strategists familiar with the plan.

The specifics: (1) anti-discrimination restrictions on insurance companies; and (2) minimum subsidy levels. On the public option?

Obama will say that his preferred mechanism remains a government-subsidized public health insurance option, but he will remain agnostic about whether the plan must include a robust public option.

Hmmm. This seems a rehash to me. Ezra is right. This is irrelevant.

Speaking for me only

Marc Ambinder:

The White House and Senate Democrats won't buckle to demands from liberals that they revise their health care strategy, officials said today. . . . A White House official conceded today that Obama would have to weather anger from liberals for a while.

. . . House Democrats are on a different track, and it's hard to see how it intersects with the White House's. Leaders plan to redouble the sales pitch for a public plan, reasoning that if they can move public opinion a few degrees -- largely by exciting liberals -- they can help their colleagues respond to conservative pressure. Privately, White House aides have communicated to the House leadership that the onus on changing minds about the public plan is on Congress, not on the president.

(Emphasis supplied.) In case you were wondering if Obama is going to fight for the public option. Ezra Klein rules our world.

Speaking for me only

Mike Lux argues that the anonymous leaks from the White House may be coming from people seeking to undermine the President's agenda:

My question now is why are certain anonymous White House officials trying to undermine the President? I ask this question in all seriousness, because this is exactly what happened in the Clinton fight for health care reform. We would do these terrific, thoughtful, complex policy meetings where we go over various options on the health care bill but make no firm decisions. The next day in the New York Times or Washington Post, some particularly controversial aspect of the bill would be headlined as in "High-ranking administration officials say Clinton is considering X." It was without question one of the things that eventually killed health care reform.

What I discovered when I worked in the White House was that there were plenty of people who work in that building whose primary loyalty is not to the President but to themselves. They leak things to reporters to cultivate them and make sure they write puff job articles about them.

Hmm. Anyway, Lux's argument hardly explains the contradictions today between Rahmbo and Gibbs. Not such a well oiled machine anymore.

Speaking for me only

Yes, I am picking on Ezra. Here's the famous anonymous White House official:

"I don't understand why the left of the left has decided that this is their Waterloo," said a senior White House adviser, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "We've gotten to this point where health care on the left is determined by the breadth of the public option. I don't understand how that has become the measure of whether what we achieve is health-care reform." "It's a mystifying thing," he added. "We're forgetting why we are in this."

(Emphasis supplied.) If you wonder if the Obama team is committed to the public option, the answer is an obvious no --"Another top aide expressed chagrin that a single element in the president's sprawling health-care initiative has become a litmus test for whether the administration is serious about the issue. "It took on a life of its own," he said." Funny, I thought the President said he supported the public option (I never had any illusion that he was married to anything.)

Speaking for me only

From the comments, Obama HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius capitulates on public option:

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said the White House would be open to co-ops instead of a government-run public option, a sign Democrats want a compromise so they can declare a victory on the must-win showdown. "I think there will be a competitor to private insurers," she said. "That's really the essential part, is you don't turn over the whole new marketplace to private insurance companies and trust them to do the right thing. We need some choices, we need some competition."

Surrendering without a shot fired. Maybe this is part of some super secret plan for the 11 dimensional chess game that only Obama seems capable of playing.

Speaking for me only

President Barack Obama:

OUR nation is now engaged in a great debate about the future of health care in America. And over the past few weeks, much of the media attention has been focused on the loudest voices. What we haven’t heard are the voices of the millions upon millions of Americans who quietly struggle every day with a system that often works better for the health-insurance companies than it does for them.

I think this is an interesting choice for framing the debate. I would have gone another way. I would have invoked the 2008 election. Those millions and millions were not silent that day.

Elections have consequences. Or at least they do when Republicans win them.

Speaking for me only

Sen. Mark Udall (D-CO) (received by e-mail, no link yet) on President Obama's speech on health care reform in Grand Junction today:

“I look forward to continuing the conversation about health insurance reform with Coloradans over the next several weeks. I want a bill that meets the needs of everyone in our state. I’m particularly focused on ensuring that any legislation we pass improves care for our rural communities and works for our small-business owners, who are the backbone of our economy. And I will have my constituents’ thoughts and suggestions in mind when I return to Washington.”

Air Force One is on the ground in Grand Junction. The town hall expected to start half hour early, at 3:45 pm MT. Local news in Grand Junction reports 4,000 protesters showed up earlier at Lincoln Park.

Grand Junction NBC page with live feed here. CNN is and MSNBC will also carry it live.

Let's keep comments to this thread on Obama's talk in Grand Junction and your reactions to it.

The Obama Movement was never really about issues. His campaign was personality centric, it was about him. This is why the Obama grass roots has been incredibly disappointing on health care. His supporters have not seen this is as being about Obama - that failure on health care reform will be a supreme failure by Obama. Some Obama folks, like Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias, have forwarded the line that a President can't get it done in order to deflect the blame from Obama. This is not only wrong, it is counterproductive to actually getting health care reform done. The reality is not only is the success or failure of health care reform on Obama, to succeed, Obama needs it to be seen as being on Obama. Today the New York Times reports:

Ezra Klein obliquely labels the Obama Administration political strategy on health care reform a failure:

The cost argument wasn't working to marshal public support. But that wasn't its real failing. [I]ts real failing was that it didn't work to marshal Washington support. That, after all, was the audience. "Bend the curve" was a strategy with particular potency in the Beltway. People care about the deficit here, or at least pretend to. And the plan was to keep this in Washington: Pass the House and Senate bills by August, use the recess to reconcile the two pieces of legislation, and take a vote in September. That required a Washington-centric argument. It failed.

Even as a Washington strategy it was destined to failure. The reason is obvious for anyone with a memory - Republicans were never ever ever going to play along. What Klein is saying is, and it is an amazing statement - that the Obama strategy on health care reform was to count on Max Baucus and his "bipartisan" Gang of 6. What an amazing blunder. It seems inexcusable really. Who came up with this one? No doubt it was Rahmbo and his sidekick (and former Baucus CoS) Jim Messina. More . . .

Paul Krugman:

“I am in this race because I don’t want to see us spend the next year re-fighting the Washington battles of the 1990s. I don’t want to pit Blue America against Red America; I want to lead a United States of America.” So declared Barack Obama in November 2007, making the case that Democrats should nominate him, rather than one of his rivals, because he could free the nation from the bitter partisanship of the past.

This was a schtick, not a serious statement. The defenders of the schtick, like Mark Schmitt, argued that it would help Obama achieve policy goals. I never believed that. I believed it would help Obama get elected by keeping the Media on his side. I think it did that. But now is the time for governing. The PPUS is a clear failure on that front. So when is it jettisoned? Sam Stein reports:

President Obama today defended U.S. funding of the war on drugs in Mexico. He "brushed aside" reports by human rights organizations of widespread torture and abuse, echoing the refrain by Mexico's President that the drug traffickers bigger human rights violators.

[H]uman rights advocates and Mexico’s human rights commission have documented numerous complaints of torture, rape, beatings and arbitrary detentions since Mr. Calderón dispatched more than 45,000 soldiers to take on traffickers.

...Repeating a line used often by President Felipe Calderón of Mexico, Mr. Obama labeled the drug traffickers causing so much violence in both Mexico and the United States as the biggest violators of human rights.

Whatever happened to "two wrongs don't make a right?"