Monday morning punditizing.
NY Times:
The president’s talk show grand slam, conversations with CNN, NBC, ABC, CBS and Univision, all taped on Friday in the Roosevelt Room, was a remarkable — and remarkably overt — display of media management. Mr. Obama even doled out equal doses of presidential charm, chuckling ruefully about "rambunctious" protesters to Bob Schieffer of CBS and speaking self-deprecatingly to George Stephanopoulos of ABC, conceding that he had not presented his health care proposals in a way that allowed people to put "their whole arms around it."
Compared with Bush's "lay down and roll over for the President" press treatment, Obama's has been different, but how remarkable is it, really?
Ross Douthat:
George W. Bush made two disaster-averting interventions for which presidents usually get canonized but in his case, the disasters he averted were created on his watch.
But you forgot Katrina. Disaster aversion for a situation of his own making (dismantling FEMA and handing it over to an unqualified political appointee) starts there.
EJ Dionne:
The way words such as "centrist" and "bipartisan" are deployed turns the discussion away from useful arguments over how various proposals might work and toward arid talk about how ideas fit into prefabricated boxes.
Jackson Diehl:
As they quietly debate the pros and cons of launching a military attack on Iran's nuclear facilities, Israel's political and military leaders no doubt will be thinking about that history. That doesn't mean they will discount American objections -- Iran would be a far harder and more complex target, with direct repercussions for U.S. troops and critical interests in the region. But, as with Gaza, even a partial and short-term reversal of the Iranian nuclear program may look to Israelis like a reasonable benefit -- and the potential blowback overblown.
Jonathan Chait:
If health care passes, will it be a grand historical achievement, or a crushing disappointment? The answer, I predict, will be both. The American health care system is an indefensible morass of waste and cruelty. The distance between the status quo and the ideal is therefore so vast that we could—and probably will—end up with a reform that massively improves the system, while coming nowhere close to the ideal.
The Hill:
Democrats hope President Barack Obama will use his multiple Sunday show appearances to clarify his demands for healthcare reform.
The arrival of the Senate Finance Committee’s long-awaited healthcare bill only exacerbated the difference between Democrats who want a public option to compete with the private insurance industry and those who want to foster competition and savings through less intrusive means.
LA Times:
Conserva-care
Four prominent conservatives propose ways to make the American healthcare system better.
Start with giving insurers more power. Mwahaha. I thought this was serious.
WaPo:
Many state and local governments are not adequately prepared to deal with a surge of patients in a flu pandemic or quickly distribute vaccine and antiviral drugs, according to two reports by federal investigators being released on Monday.
We know that; it's why we write about it so much.