ANOTHER FREAKIN' SPEECH?:

Obama May Get More Specific About Health Overhaul (CHARLES BABINGTON, 9/02/09, Associated Press)

Faced with falling approval ratings and increasingly impatient with Senate negotiations, Obama is considering a speech in the next week or so in which he would be "more prescriptive" about what he feels Congress must include in a health bill, top adviser David Axelrod said Tuesday in an interview.

The speech might occur before the Sept. 15 deadline the White House gave Senate negotiators to seek a bipartisan bill, Axelrod said. He suggested that two key Republicans have not bargained in good faith.

Given that the President had no executive experience and surrounded himself with a staff likewise unequal to the job he was taking on, no one should have expected him to acquit himself well, especially in the early going. But we're nine months in now; do they really not get that the more they have him talk the worse he does? Just hide him away or send him abroad while the Congress grinds out some bill that you can claim is a massively important reform of the health care system and then declare you got everything you wanted.

Posted by Orrin Judd at September 2, 2009 7:55 AM