Public Option, Public Opinion

Like most Republicans who want to make sure health care reform dies screaming, Karl Rove has now suddenly discovered that public opinion "matters".

Americans are now seeing the damage that polls and focus groups can inflict on White House decision-making. President Barack Obama is no longer shaping the public dialogue on health-care reform. Instead, he is losing control of his agenda and resorting to rhetorical tricks and evasions.

Every administration has to take into account public opinion. Without doing so, Abraham Lincoln said, little can be achieved. But too much polling doesn’t raise presidential vision. It narrows and pulls it down. Substituting a weekly dose of opinion surveys for thoughtful consideration is causing White House aides to find new scapegoats whenever administration policy initiatives get into trouble.

Which is hysterical, because public opinion and public debate didn't matter a damn bit to Karl Rove or his boss Dubya when it came to Iraq, warrantless wiretapping, SCHIP, stem cell research, the PATRIOT act, FISA, or on virtually any other major public initiative, making Karl Rove actually saying that bolded statement one of the most gobsmacking instances of self-serving garbage ever uttered in history.

For eight years, the Bush administration declared it needed no debate, no public opinion polls, no permission from anybody to lay down the law as dictated by the "plenary executive". The wishes of Congress and the American people were utterly irrelevant as the President has all the authority he needed derived from John Yoo's magical memos. When he wasn't flat out hiding what he was doing, the stuff that was public had no oversight and no check or balance. Congress crumpled like a rag doll.

Now, Karl Rove is not only being transparently hypocritical, he's actually chiding the Obama administration for not taking the unilateral approach and actually listening to people...and complaining that he's not listening to the astroturfed mob unleashed on Democrats this week and warning that taxes are coming.

This coming from the from the guys that brought us a massive tax cut for the wealthy ($1.3 trillion) and then a prescription drug bonanza for Big Pharma ($1.2 trillion), both of which were more expensive than the cost of the health care reform proposals to the national debt. Had no problem passing that, did we? Health care at $900 billion? Intolerable for America.

And it keeps going on and on and on...