Breaking: Kucinich To Vote Yes
In a big get for House Dems, Dennis Kucinich just made it official: He’s voting for the Senate bill, making him the first member to go on record fliping his vote from No to Yes.
“In the past week it’s become clear that the vote on the final bill will be very close,” Kucinich, who voted No last time because of the lack of the public option, said at a presser moments ago. He acknowleged that he’d be voting “not on the bill as I would like to see it, but as it is.”
“However, after careful discussions with President Obama, Speaker Pelosi” and others, Kucinich said, “I’ve decided to cast a vote in favor of the legislation.”
Kucinich’s stance was being closely watched by both sides, partly as a test of President Obama’s ability to corral the support of reluctant Dems. Obama wooed him directly with a lift on Air Force One and gave a big health care speech in his district earlier this week.
Kucinich is one of around 10 former No votes who have been aggressively wooed by Dem leaders to flip to Yes. His decision means that Nancy Pelosi’s margin for error is every so slightly bigger: Dem leaders can now afford to lose one Yes vote.
More soon.
Update: Kucinich revealed he’d met four times with President Obama, mostly going over his objections, but said he’d been persuaded in part because at one recent meeting he recognized how difficult Obama’s challenge is.
“I left it with a real sense of compassion for our president and what he’s going through,” he said. “We have to be compassionate towards those who are called upon to make decisions for this nation. It’s not an easy burden that he’s taken up.
Kucinich said Obama didn’t make any promises to take up the public option later.
“What he committed to was to continue to work with me on the broad concerns that I have,” he said. “He didn’t make any specific commitment.”
Update II: Kucinich said that ultimately he couldn’t escape the argument that “something is better than nothing.”
“People are looking for some hope that maybe something can be changed,” he said, suggesting that he may have been persuaded by Obama’s frequent argument that passing reform is essential in order to prove to Americans that government is not entirely dysfunctional.
Kucinich conceded that he decided to swallow the bill because failure would be a threat to Obama’s overall agenda. He said he has “a real desire for our president to succeed,” adding that “one of the things that bothers me is the attempt to deligitimize this presidency.”
Kucinich said Obama had offered him nothing concrete in exchange for his vote. “There was no Nebraska or Louisiana type deal,” he said.
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I agree that Obama should have spent SOME time reaching out to the GOP and the Blue Dogs, just not ALL of the time.
As for his running as a centrist, during the campaign, a great deal of his rhetoric sounded pretty liberal to my liberal ears. How about his smackdown of the mandate? How about his qualified endorsement of single payer? It appears to me that Obama is buying into that nonsense that you absolutely MUST move toward the right.
I have no illusions about Obama being a liberal, believe me. However, he must realize that without the support of the liberals he would not have won the election. I get that he doesn’t want to give the GOP ammo by pushing a liberal agenda. But guess what? Trying to govern as a centrist has earned him cries of “socialist” from those very folks he’s trying to reach out to WHILE he is shutting out the liberals. That is not a smart strategy and it has backfired.
Obama is a smart guy. He should be at least bright enough to realize that no matter how often he kisses GOP @ss, they aren’t going to work with him. His best chance is to thump them hard and crush them on an initiative or two and make THEM come to him. His groveling on the right side of the aisle has not helped anybody except those on the right. He just doesn’t strike me as being a very forceful leader and that is what we’ve needed most during the last year.
I agree that liberals need to be lighting a fire under him. I do what I can, here and to my Congress critters and directly to the White House.
However, I’ll tell you plainly: if a credible progressive alternative to Obama – and even the Dems – arose, it wouldn’t take too much to make me seriously consider dumping a rather weak centrist for a more committed liberal.