Somebody at the White House needs to be fired

Apparently, the health care reform issue has caught the White House by surprise. They had no idea that folks on the left cared about the public option, they're now telling the Washington Post.

What?

They had no idea, they say, that it was a make or break issue for people.

Again, what?

That is either a lie, or the president is being staffed by idiots.

How many times do we have to tell people in the White House that their lack of outreach to Democrats is going to bite them in the ass?

Read this in today's Washington Post, about the uproar over Obama caving on the public option:

"I don't understand why the left of the left has decided that this is their Waterloo," said a senior White House adviser, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "We've gotten to this point where health care on the left is determined by the breadth of the public option. I don't understand how that has become the measure of whether what we achieve is health-care reform."

"It's a mystifying thing," he added. "We're forgetting why we are in this."

Another top aide expressed chagrin that a single element in the president's sprawling health-care initiative has become a litmus test for whether the administration is serious about the issue.

"It took on a life of its own," he said.

"The left of the left." That would be people like me, a former Republican, Markos, former military and a former Republican, and Arianna, a former Republican. Yes, we're such wacky tree-hugging liberals, all of us. That would be all of you who read the progressive blogs. And all of you who are members of unions like the AFL and SEIU. And all of you who belong to MoveOn, or who are members of any of the myriad non-profits around town who are working on the health care reform issue. All of you, to this White House, are "the left of the left." The crazies. The wacko fringe. But next election, Barack Obama will be happy to take your money and your votes, just like he did last time for promises that are now too wacky to keep.

You don't hear similar criticism coming out of the White House about the crazy teabaggers shutting down the town hall meetings and accusing Obama of being a socialist, and Hitler. You don't hear senior White House officials calling them the right of the right, or questioning their dedication to the cause. No, they're patriotic Americans exercising their First Amendment rights, White House officials tell the press. And Republican Senator Chuck Grassley, who's been running around the country telling people that Barack Obama plans to put millions of elderly to death - never a bad word from the White House about him either. The only people that Barack Obama's White House feels comfortable deriding and dismissing in the media are the people who put him into office in the first place. Democrats.

Yes, the same way the smartest people in the world over at the White House were mystified that a simple issue like comparing gay marriage to incest and pedophilia would cause an outright rupture with the gay community, after we warned them for months, publicly and privately, that there would be such a rupture, here we go again with the surprise over the rupture over health care reform. No one could have seen it coming. Right.

And, a senior Obama aide has the gall to suggest that "we're forgetting why we are in this"? Et tu, Brute? You people have forgotten why you were elected in the first place. You've forgotten promise after promise that your boss made to community after community on the left. And now you have the nerve to criticize us for trying to hold you accountable for your growing string of broken promises after we busted our asses getting your boss elected.

President Obama's White House simply doesn't care about having a real relationship with actual Democrats. They don't like anyone they can't control. They don't like non-profit advocacy groups, and have been actively working to defund them (just as they did with the 527 during the campaign), and they don't like the blogosphere, so during the campaign they instead created their own blogosphere.

Yes, yes, they send us emails and do call to check in from time to time. And we appreciate that. But there is no effort made to include the blogosphere in any kind of larger strategy on issues ranging from the stimulus to health care reform. As a reader of ours noted a few months back: Can you imagine the Republicans pushing their top agenda items and not asking talk radio and FOX News to help them out?

And all that leads to a situation where a key component of the health care plan, that even Joe and I (who are hardly experts on health care reform) knew months ago was going to cause an uproar among Demorats if it wasn't included, gets dropped by Obama, causes an uproar, and senior White House aides talk about how they never saw it coming.

Can you say "Heck of a job, Brownie"?

And then, in classic Obama White House style, when you get upset about President Obama backing off a major campaign promise, you're the bad guy for expecting Barack Obama to keep his word and do the thing he promised he'd do in exchange for your vote.

To some degree, it's understandable that senior Obama advisers are giving quotes like this to the Washington Post because you'd have to be seriously out of touch, and a bit of an idiot politically, to have gotten an overwhelmingly popular president, with control of both houses of Congress, into this mess in the first place.

How many times do we have to have the same blow ups with Barack Obama's people, for the same reasons, before someone in the White House realizes that they have a serious problem on their hands? Is this what the next four years are going to be like?