Greg Sargent at the Washington Post reports and comments on the new book by Richard Wolff, which quotes Rahm as being anti-bipartisanship. This is not news, as the very fact that Obama brought Rahm on board was enough to convince any thinking person that the President did not really believe his own unifying campaign rhetoric. More interesting to me is Sargent’s recounting of the health care debate:
The decision to waste time chasing bipartisan support for health reform was clearly one of the mistakes that led to health care being such a big political liability for Dems. It extended the whole mess by months and months, which gave opponents more time to demagogue the bill and scare voters and helped turn the public against the process.
Sargent is presenting a fictional account of events. No bipartisanship was ever sought on health care. That’s not what Democrats were doing. The reason it took so long is because they couldn’t get their own caucus to agree on what to include. At no point did they ever sincerely attempt to bring Republicans into the process.
