By CARRIE BUDOFF BROWN | 7/20/09 7:32 PM EDT
Updated: 7/20/09 10:00 PM EDT
President Barack Obama dove into the political street-fight threatening his signature issue Monday — taking aim at a first-term Republican senator in hopes of rallying Democrats increasingly nervous about Obama-style reform.
The White House opened an aggressive three-week push for health care legislation before the August recess with Obama attacking Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) for saying health care might be Obama’s “Waterloo.” Obama’s press secretary and national party chairman picked up on the line of attack as well.
Republicans responded in kind Monday — with Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele describing Obama’s health care plan as a “multitrillion-dollar experiment” and his administration’s approach as socialism.
But for all the fire pointed their way by the White House, Republicans are hardly Obama’s biggest headache. His problems lately have come from within his own party, as divided House and Senate caucuses have shown a surprising willingness to buck Obama on his top domestic priority just six months into his presidency.
Obama seems mindful of the problem — and was clearly hoping Monday that he could stir up Democrats’ anger toward DeMint’s comments, perhaps even long enough for them to forget all the things that worry them about Obama’s plans for reform.
DeMint said Friday on a conservative conference call that “if we’re able to stop Obama on this, it will be his Waterloo. It will break him.”
On Monday, Obama responded, quoting DeMint’s line word for word. “Think about that. This isn’t about me. This isn’t about politics. This is about a health care system that is breaking America’s families, breaking America’s businesses and breaking America’s economy. And we can’t afford the politics of delay and defeat when it comes to health care, not this time, not now.”
Later in an interview with PBS’s Jim Lehrer, Obama even invoked the memory of Hillary Clinton’s failed attempt to overhaul health care in the 1990s — with a warning that Republicans used Clinton’s defeat as a springboard back to power.
“They explicitly went after the Clintons, said we’re not going to get this done,” Obama said. “So it was a pure political play, a show of strength by the Republicans that helped them regain the House. I think there are folks who think that we should try to dust off that old playbook.”
And in an unusual move, he made a personal appeal to a handful of progressive bloggers during a late afternoon conference call to keep up the pressure on lawmakers and debunk false information about his plan.
"I know the blogs are best at debunking myths that can slip through a lot of the traditional media outlets," he said, according to the Huffington Post. "And that is why you are going to play such an important role in our success in the weeks to come."
For his part, DeMint pushed back at Obama’s remarks Monday with a statement saying, “Let’s be clear: There is no one in this debate advocating that we do nothing despite the president’s constant straw man arguments.”
The Democratic concerns run deep — so deep that it’s not clear that a political pitch from the president can ease their worries, given their substantive problems with the plan.
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0709/25183.html