The Note: Can Obama Regroup on Health Care?

By RICK KLEINAnd so that’s that. Take a breath if you’d like — assuming you don’t mind what the air might bring.Yet maybe a good airing out is just what health care reform needs. This wasn’t going to be a perfect game — not even close. This was going to be messy, ugly, unpleasant, and occasionally nasty. And if the deadline didn’t shift, it was going to fail, too.As President Obama pointed out this week, Washington doesn’t act without deadlines. But when you make your own schedules and even write your own laws, deadlines can be excuses for inaction, too.With Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s concession on the worst-kept secret in town, August looms now as a tempting target for both sides of the debate.Yes, the opponents will be able to step up their campaign. Yes, the president loses a touch of political sway with every passing day. (And, as his decision to comment on the “Skip” Gates case shows, it’s easy to get distracted along the way.)But Democrats needed a new debate anyway; momentum was gone before Reid made it official.Now the president and his allies can try to find a new case to make. This is moving slowly, but from the White House’s perspective, at least it’s still moving.Only optimism from the top: “Our general view is we can get this done by the fall, and so this doesn't set back that schedule,” Obama told ABC’s Terry Moran, in an “Nightline” interview. “Frankly if you don't express a sense of urgency about this thing then people always say, 'Let's put it off.' And I really do think that the families that I talk to who are struggling with health care right now can't afford it to be put off.” Bluster: “I’m from Chicago. I don’t break,” he said at a DNC fundraiser in his hometown Thursday night.House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.: “I am not afraid of August.” Reid, D-Nev.: “It's better to have a product that is based on quality and thoughtfulness rather than to jam something through.” Why time might be on the president’s side after all: “The irony is that some of the soundest advice [Alex] Castellanos offered to Republicans, to urge the president to ‘slow down,’ is what the voters are trying to tell Obama and his fellow Democrats,” Charlie Cook writes in National Journal. “Taking the time to fix the problems in the health care and climate-change bills while waiting for enough good economic news to make people feel a bit more comfortable with new spending might not be the worst thing for Democrats to do.” “This will be interesting in a number of ways and for a number of reasons, among them that we’ve never seen him publicly defeated before, because he hasn’t been,” Peggy Noonan writes in her Wall Street Journal column. “The White House misread the national mood. The problem isn’t that they didn’t ‘bend the curve,’ or didn’t sell it right. The problem is that the national mood has changed since the president was elected.” If this is going to move, it’s going to happy slowly: “If Obama's initiative is to be anywhere near as successful, it will be by small steps taken in a divided Congress right now. No giant leaps are in sight,” the AP’s Erica Werner reports. Summer recess means there’s only voice in Washington for a stretch: “Now, the president and his allies hope he can use the bully pulpit to keep up momentum while Congress is out of town,” Janet Adamy and Jonathan Weisman report in The Wall Street Journal. Another opponent to mobilize against: “White House officials say that they have been given more ammunition from yet another Republican senator to make the point that much of the opposition against President Obama's health care reform push is political, about power and not principle,” ABC’s Jake Tapper reports. “Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla., this week talked with two talk radio hosts about President Obama's health care reform push as a way for the Republicans to win back seats in the House and Senate, as happened in the 1994 Republican Revolution after former President Bill Clinton's health care reform efforts.”The sausage is getting spicy: “The comments by Reid (D-Nev.) confirmed the growing consensus on Capitol Hill that the White House's fast-track approach has failed, and that a more plodding and contentious process has taken hold,” The Washington Post’s Shailagh Murray, Paul Kane and Michael A. Fletcher report. “Not only would the Senate not meet Obama's timeline for passing a bill, but across the Capitol, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) was struggling to quell an uprising by conservative Democrats that had brought House action to a near halt.” Would a strong-arm move in the House work? “In truth Pelosi could, with enough pressure, probably pass just about anything out of the House. But votes that rely on her playing the heavy with her own caucus come with a high price,” per Time’s Jay Newton-Small. “Joked Rep. Charlie Melancon, a Louisiana Democrat and a Blue Dog, ‘we're going to need some orthopedists around here to take care of the broken bones and twisted arms.’ ” “Months”? Rep. Jim Cooper, D-Tenn., on ABCNews.com’s “Top Line”: “This is the early stage of a debate. It’s early and I’m glad for all the media interest in it, but we are months away from a resolution of this problem.” Still feeling urgency: “The White House chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, led a hastily called three-hour negotiating session at the Capitol with conservative Blue Dog Democrats, the group of fiscal hawks who have stalled action on the health care bill in the House,” David M. Herszenhorn and Jeff Zeleny report in The New York Times. But fall is crowded already: “While Congress can resume its efforts in the fall, other major items on the president’s agenda, like climate change and rewriting financial regulation, have also been postponed, and are likely to be further delayed until the health care debate is resolved,” they write. “The delay opens the most ambitious legislative initiative in more than 40 years to a month of fierce scrutiny as special-interest groups ramp up what was already expected to be a firestorm of ads, organizing and lobbying,” Politico’s Carrie Budoff Brown and Chris Frates report. “Democrats will head home without a single plan to promote, complicating efforts to counter a suddenly more cohesive Republican opposition built around the plan’s trillion-dollar price tag.” Unless: “Less pressure means more time to think — and to haggle civilly, as opposed to haggling with a looming deadline,” The Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder writes. Who to blame? “Democrats fought with each other Thursday over health care — and Senate leaders put off any final votes until September — as President Barack Obama's party found it difficult to create any momentum from his nationally televised appeal for overhauling the system,” McClatchy’s David Lightman reports. “If health care is to be Obama's Waterloo, as Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) wished for him, it will be because he hasn't been able to herd his fellow Democrats into a consensus,” The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank writes. “Blindingly obvious contradictions are why the Democratic health plans are collapsing under their own weight — at the hands of Democrats,” Charles Krauthammer writes in his column. Lots of folks could use a break: “Obama's press conference last night drew 24.7 million viewers across broadcast and cable, according to Nielsen. That's a 14 percent drop from the April 29 prime-time presser, and 50 percent less than the first one of his presidency,” per Politico’s Michael Calderone. “The all-Obama, all-the-time carpet bombing of the news media represents a strategy by a White House seeking to deploy its most effective asset in service of its goals, none more critical now than health care legislation. But longtime Washington hands warn that saturation coverage can diminish the power of his voice and lose public attention,” Peter Baker writes in The New York Times. Back to private meetings: Reid and Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus get to work out that timeline with the president directly, with an 11:30 am ET meeting in the Oval Office.The president has lunch with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, and outlines a new Department of Education grant program at 1:15 pm ET.Coming up on “This Week” Sunday: George Stephanopoulos hosts a health care debate, with Sen. Kent Conrad, D-N.D., and Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C.  If the president could only get past (or does he want to?) the incident involving his friend in Cambridge:Standing by his comments: “I have to say I am surprised by the controversy surrounding my statement, because I think it was a pretty straightforward commentary that you probably don't need to handcuff a guy — a middle-aged man who uses a cane — who's in his own home,” Obama told ABC's Terry Moran. “I think that I have extraordinary respect for the difficulties of the job that police officers do,” the president said. “And my suspicion is that words were exchanged between the police officer and Mr. Gates, and that everybody should have just settled down and cooler heads should have prevailed. That's my suspicion.” Not settling down — “Sergeant Gets Backup”: “The Cambridge police commissioner, breaking his public silence yesterday amid an increasingly vitriolic debate, strongly defended the actions of the sergeant who arrested Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr.,” per The Boston Globe. “[Commissioner Robert C.] Haas described Sergeant James M. Crowley as a ‘stellar member’ of the department who had ‘tried to deescalate the situation’ before he arrested Gates last week on the porch of Gates’s Cambridge house. Haas emphatically said that Gates’s arrest was not racially tinged.” “He [Crowley] tried to move away from the situation, and, when he wasn’t successful, he used arrest as a last resort,” Haas said. “I do not believe his actions were in any way racially motivated.”Said NPR’s Juan Williams, on the president’s reaction: “I’m not sure he saw the police report. . . . It’s not a case of racial profiling. . . . He got out way too far.” (What did Professor Gates say about Crowley’s mother? Does the president want to own that?)ABC’s Dan Harris reported Friday on “Good Morning America” that Crowley is considering a defamation lawsuit.Said Bill Cosby: “If I’m the president of the United States, I don’t care how much pressure people want to put on it about race, I’m keeping my mouth shut. . . . I was shocked to hear the president making this kind of statement.”The Rev. Al Sharpton: “He had the courage to take a position at a time when he knows some people will disagree,” Sharpton said, per ABC’s Russell Goldman. “If he hadn't addressed it, it would have looked like he was ducking. I was surprised he said what he said, because his words brought the conversation to a new level.” What the president has gotten himself into: “President Barack Obama has strained through his career in national politics to embrace nuance in all things, and never more than when the subject is race,” Politico’s Ben Smith and Nia-Malika Henderson report. “But an off-the-cuff remark at the end of a news conference designed to further his health care agenda put him at the center of a familiar public melodrama of white cop and black victim in which big-city mayors — never mind presidents — tread with the greatest of caution.”Also making news (as always): Gov. Sarah Palin, R-Alaska, leaves office Sunday, and her base of support isn’t what it once was.”As she packs up the Alaska governor's mansion and pushes back against the latest ethics brouhaha, Sarah Palin's got other problems: A more negative public image than she held during the 2008 campaign – and broader questions about her grasp of complex issues,” ABC polling director Gary Langer writes. “Just 40 percent of Americans in this ABC News/Washington Post poll hold a favorable opinion of Palin overall, down from a high of 58 percent shortly after she joined the GOP presidential ticket. More than half, 53 percent, now view her unfavorably.” Can she call them Barbara and John? Senators Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., and John Kerry, D-Mass., challenge Palin to a debate on energy and environmental issues: “We respectfully invite Gov. Palin to join that reality-based debate — one that relies on facts, science, tested economics and steely-eyed national security interests. Our country needs nothing less, and our planet depends on it,” they write in a Washington Post op-ed. The new education initiative that’s coming Friday: “President Obama is leaning hard on the nation's schools, using the promise of $4 billion in federal aid — and the threat of withholding it — to strong-arm the education establishment to accept more charter schools and performance pay for teachers,” Michael D. Shear and Nick Anderson write in The Washington Post.
Said the president, in an interview with the Post: “What we're saying here is, if you can't decide to change these practices, we're not going to use precious dollars that we want to see creating better results; we're not going to send those dollars there,” Obama said. “And we're counting on the fact that, ultimately, this is an incentive, this is a challenge for people who do want to change.” “The controversial ‘Race to the Top’ program offers one of the first glimpses into how far the Obama administration is willing to go to create reform,” ABC’s Mary Bruce and Yunji de Nies report. “States will be judged based on their progress in each of the four areas and — given the way several states have been using education stimulus money to fill budget gaps rather than to innovate — it is clear that not all states will be awarded funding.” Education Secretary Arne Duncan, to ABC’s Yunji de Nies on “GMA” Friday: “We're looking for those folks that are willing to break the mold, to break through, to push a very strong reform agenda, to recognize and reward excellence.” One of the more remarkable political stories of the year: Time’s Massimo Calabresi and Michael Weisskopf go inside the final days of the Bush White House — where Vice President Dick Cheney was personally lobbying President Bush for a pardon for Scooter Libby right to the end. The incredible post-publication response from Cheney: “Scooter Libby is an innocent man who was the victim of a severe miscarriage of justice,” Cheney said, per ABC’s Jonathan Karl. Richard Armitage, Cheney said, “leaked the name and hid that fact from most of his colleagues, including the President.” Cheney added: “Mr. Libby is an honorable man and a faithful public servant who served the President, the Vice President and the nation with distinction for many years.  He deserved a presidential pardon.”  For stimulus (and Hollywood) watchers: “Brad Pitt's Make It Right Foundation is among a consortium applying for federal stimulus money that could expand his effort to rebuild homes in New Orleans and also launch a project in Newark, N.J.,” Variety’s Ted Johnson reports. “The stimulus money would be seed funding for an expansion of Make It Right,” said Trevor Neilson, Pitt's philanthropic and political adviser.
The Kicker: “Somebody just asked me what's more exciting, that or the Dow going over 9000, and I said I promise you a perfect game. Now that's big.” — President Obama.”It’s a month.” — House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, on her feelings on August.Today on the “Top Line” political Webcast, live at noon ET: Rep. Jared Polis, D-Colo.; ABC’s George Stephanopoulos. Follow The Note on Twitter: http://twitter.com/thenote For up-to-the-minute political updates check out The Note’s blog . . . all day every day:

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