[Updated below, with CNN’s response.]
Robert Gibbs, the White House spokesman, became a media critic today, hammering CNN hard for relying on a police scanner this morning to misreport a Coast Guard training exercise on the Potomac River. The original CNN report wrongly suggested that shots had been fired on the river and noted that …
Here’s a story from me about the latest in the Senate on health care reform. I was surprised to hear that the White House hasn’t been wooing any other moderate Republicans aside from Maine’s Olympia Snowe:
During the summer of discontent the White House stopped reaching out to some key potential votes: the other senator from Maine,
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At the end of a cabinet meeting today, President Obama took a couple questions from reporters. The first:
Q Do you accept Wilson’s apology, sir?
THE PRESIDENT: Yes, I do. I’m a big believer that we all make mistakes. He apologized quickly and without equivocation, and I’m appreciative of that.
That is right, to a point. Wilson …
The initial polling from last night’s speech is good, but looking forward, Obama must work on two levels to get this bill to the finish line. Here’s my story for TIME.com on what they were trying to accomplish last night, and how things look today.
This is how the President of the United States like it when the pressure is on: Cherry-red, with thin silvery-white diagonal stripes. He wore this tie last night. (See it here.) But that’s not all. Gabriel Winant, an eagle-eyed blogger at Salon, lays out the pattern.
Well, there’s last night. Then there’s the president’s
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I got the same impression from the President’s speech as the New York Times’ David Herzenhorn did:
From my new story on Time.com:
“You lie!”
Those words cut in politics. When directed at the President of the United States, during a prime time address to the nation no less, they cut deep.
So when Rep. Joe Wilson, a little known Republican and Army reserve veteran from South Carolina shouted them at the nation’s
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It attempted to be not a description of the ideal, but rather one of the doable. As one senior White House official put it a few hours before the speech: “There is a path to get this done. … The issues that separate us are not insuperable.”
After the jump, the text of Teddy Kennedy’s letter that President Obama cited in the speech. Also, Obama will host a group of bipartisan Senate centrists tomorrow — including, Michael Scherer reports from the Hill, Nebraska Senator Ben Nelson — at the White House to talk about health care.
After the jump is the text of Rep. Charles Boustany’s GOP response to the President’s speech. Republican leaders said they didn’t want a big name to deliver this rebuttal – thus the relatively unknown Boustany, who hails from Louisiana and happens to be a heart surgeon. Also, wonder what some GOP members were waving during the …
Read along after the jump. Members named: John Dingell, John McCain, Ted Kennedy, Orrin Hatch and Chuck Grassley.
Here are the excerpts from President Obama’s speech tonight, which have been released by the White House:
I am not the first President to take up this cause, but I am determined to be the last. It has now been nearly a century since Theodore Roosevelt first called for health care reform. And ever since, nearly every President and
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Tonight, President Barack Obama will once again declare his preference for the so-called public insurance option, a cause célèbre for Congressional liberals and a deal breaker for many Senate moderates. But that’s about as far as the president will go. He won’t demand a public option. He won’t threaten a veto if he doesn’t get …
