President Barack Obama’s historic attendance at the Republican Party’s annual retreat, before a live television audience, on January 29, 2010, was a tour de force of competence and clarity. It was nothing like many had ever seen before, in terms of the demonstrated depth of knowledge by a U.S. president on a complicated topic.
The Republicans who would spend the entire Obama administration describing the 44th president as “incompetent”, “naive”, or “over his head” had bitten off more than they could chew and they regretted the decision to allow cameras into the event:
MSNBC’s Luke Russert, who was on the scene in Baltimore, relayed that a Republican official and other GOP aides had confided to him that allowing the “cameras to roll like that” was a “mistake.”
There are so many moments during the Obama years that still remain impressively stunning. This was one of those moments that many appreciated in real time as legendary, especially as it related to the President’s sheer virtuosity, as Raw Story recently reported:
President Barack Obama spent more than an hour Jan. 29, 2010, taking questions — on live TV — at a House Republican retreat in Baltimore, where he urged GOP lawmakers, including then-Rep. Mike Pence, to “challenge my ideas.”
The event drew widespread praise from pundits and lawmakers, although Republicans conceded it was probably a “mistake” to let cameras roll — and Obama’s performance was so effective that Fox News cut away from their own live feed about 20 minutes before the end.
(emphasis, diarist)
In light of recent reports concerning the ignorance of the current occupant of the White House on the sobering issue of healthcare, Obama’s calm and skillful presentation on that winter’s day in January will forever stand as the embodiment of what is required in presidential leadership.
During this 2010 healthcare meeting, the President chided Republicans, and specifically former congressman and now Secretary of Health and Human Services Tom Price, on offering assertions based on unsubstantiated facts.
“I am absolutely committed to working with you on these issues, but it can’t just be political assertions that aren’t substantiated when it comes to the actual details of policy,” Obama said. “Because otherwise, we’re going to be selling the American people a bill of goods. I mean, the easiest thing for me to do on the health care debate would have been to tell people that what you’re going to get is guaranteed health insurance, lower your costs, all the insurance reforms; we’re going to lower the costs of Medicare and Medicaid and it won’t cost anybody anything. That’s great politics, it’s just not true.”
This meeting with Republicans was so instructive that Barack Obama convened a second event on February 25, 2010.
“Obama dominated the debate during Thursday’s nearly seven hour cross-party summit on healthcare, always in command not only of the room but also of the most intricate policy details, as he personally rebutted every point he disagreed with,” wrote Caren Bohan, White House correspondent for Reuters, about the Feb. 25, 2010, event.
The following comment by the 44th president is prescient as it relates to the current Republican effort on healthcare:
“I’d like the Republicans to do a little soul searching and find out are there some things that you’d be willing to embrace that get to this core problem of 30 million people without health insurance, and dealing seriously with the preexisting-condition issue,” Obama said in February 2010.
I continue to be more impressed by this president with the advance of time.