Health Care – What Did Obama Say?

Did Sen. Obama campaign on a public option or not?  It’s a question that is taking up a lot of pixels online and airtime on radio and TV.  As a motivation to go looking for some answers, I have pondered something for a while about President Obama and other elected officials: How much does every American read into a candidates’ generic statement?  Are we really listening to what they’re saying or are we hearing what we want to hear?  All too often, I fear it is the latter.   That’s one reason why campaigns are so frustrating to many people.  Candidates are purposefully generic because they know everybody will read into their statements what they want to some degree.  Getting elected is all about convincing enough people that you support everybody’s position.  You can’t, of course, but that’s the task.

To begin with, I think I remember then-Sen. Obama campaigning on a public option.  While I knew he wasn’t the most progressive Democratic candidate, he was all I had once Nov. 2008 rolled around.  But did he campaign on something close to what I wanted or didn’t he?  Here is some of what I found:

Republicans Want to Open West, Coastal Areas to Drilling; AP Coverage Misses Mark

By this point, President Bush’s announcement that he wants the oil shale development moratorium repealed, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and off-shore drilling opened up for oil and gas drilling should be well known. But is it well known for the correct reasons? Is the media focused on the true aspects of this issue or are they caught up once again in ridiculous tiff reporting?

Allow me to provide a short answer to the second question: the media has reported on the “he-said, she-said” side of the issue more than the details of it. No one should be surprised. After all, the AP seems to be more worried about how much quoting of one of their articles by blogs constitutes fair-use, even though it’s not in their purview to decide such things. Perhaps if they spent more time on actually reporting, bloggers wouldn’t have to quote the one or two salient facts they actually managed to write down and then do the hard work of providing the context the corporate media decided wasn’t sexy enough to include in the first place.

A longer answer to the questions raised above can be found below the fold.