Anonymous sources inside the White House confirm that President Barack Obama, in a bold gesture of bipartisanship, has asked Joe Biden to resign so that he can appoint centrist Republican Sen. Olympia Snowe to replace him as vice president. Biden has agreed to step aside, reportedly feeling increasingly out of place in an administration that is tacking to the right on key issues.
Obama and Snowe will hold a joint press conference tomorrow morning to announce the change, and to promote Snowe's much-touted "trigger" for a public option in the health care reform bill moving through the Senate.
Anonymous sources report that President Obama regrets promising a public health care plan when he ran for president in 2008. The same sources report that Obama has decided to seek Republican support for all his policy goals from now on -- and is willing to modify his goals significantly in order to get their support -- in order to replace the support of his progressive base that propelled him to victory in the primaries and the general election but which is likely to desert him in wake of his dramatic reversal on health care.
Unnamed White House officials also report that President Obama has had lengthy discussions about his prospects for reelection in 2012, and that he plans to run as an independent rather than as a Democrat. "The whole thing about being a Democrat was really just a way to get his foot in the door of the Oval Office," said one source, who added that "Barack Obama would like to cast himself in the bipartisan mold of Joe Lieberman, who is not afraid to oppose the priorities of his party in order to stand up for what's right for America's largest and most profitable corporations." Obama's replacement of Biden with Snowe and his embrace of Snowe's "trigger" option on health care appears to be the first step in this bold reshaping of his image.
Reactions around Washington are reported as "elation" and "relief." An anonymous political columnist for a major newspaper was reported as saying: "Every time I hear the word 'bipartisanship' I feel a tingle running up my leg, but when I heard about President Obama's full-blown reversal on public health care and his desire to appoint Olympia Snowe as vice president, it was positively orgasmic! It was as though my ego had been stroked to the point of total, mind-blowing release."
An anonymous health insurance CEO, interviewed on his private jet en route to an exotic location to personally retrieve a case of gourmet coffee valued at approximately the cost of saving the life of a cancer patient whose claim his company recently denied over a technicality, was reported as saying: "For a short while I worried that Obama's rhetoric about 'hope' and 'change' meant he really might try to do something to take away the absolute power of the wealthy ruling class, but now I know for sure that is was just a flourish of rhetoric, a performance he needed to make to get elected."
It remains unclear whether any Republicans other than Senator (soon to be Vice President) Olympia Snowe will actually support President Obama -- or how rank-and-file members of his own party will react to his "pulling a Lieberman." One thing that has already become clear, however, is that Sen. Harry Reid, often lambasted by progressive members of his own party for lacking a spine, has reportedly woken up with terrible back pain after announcing that he will push for a triggerless public option in the Senate health care reform bill despite having been informed by the president that this policy is no longer supported by the White House. "I got out of bed this morning and found a hard lump running down the entire length of my back that was never there before," he said, "and I was terrified! I mean, I thought I had some kind of rapidly growing tumor." Sen. Reid added, "now I realize why it's so important that all Americans have access to good, affordable health care like I already do as a United States Senator."