President-elect Donald Trump said he would consider leaving in place certain parts of the Affordable Care Act, an indication of possible compromise after a campaign in which he pledged repeatedly to repeal the 2010 health-care law....Which reminds me of this, from The Washington Post:
Mr. Trump said he favors keeping the prohibition against insurers denying coverage because of patients’ existing conditions, and a provision that allows parents to provide years of additional coverage for children on their insurance policies....
On health care, Mr. Trump said a big reason for his shift from his call for an all-out repeal was the meeting at the White House with Mr. Obama, who, he said, suggested areas of the Affordable Care Act, widely known as Obamacare, to preserve.
Several of Trump's former executives said staffers knew that the last person to talk to the boss about an issue would usually get what he or she wanted. That trait was so reliable that at least one executive, who asked not to be named because he still advises Trump, said he would camp out in Trump's office in the final hours ahead of key deadlines, making certain that his would be the last word the boss heard before making his decision.So that's how Barack Obama can save America, or at least salvage some of what needs preserving: He should make it his goal to speak to President Trump as often as possible, and be the last person to talk to him about every important issue.
After the two men met, Trump said he'd be amenable to that:
President-elect Trump, who rose to political fame by falsely questioning the birthplace of the sitting president, said he had "great respect" for Obama, called him a "very good man" and said he would seek his "counsel" in the future....There's Obama's post-presidential mission: Be a president whisperer. Get in touch with Trump every day or two, and explain to him that good laws -- Social Security? Medicare? The Iran deal? The Paris accords? -- are "high-flying assets" and "really great things that have been achieved."
"I very much look forward to dealing with the president in the future, including counsel," Trump said. "He's -- he explained some of the difficulties, some of the high-flying assets, and some of the really great things that have been achieved."
Do this, Mr. President. Your country will thank you.
11 comments:
If not Obama, somebody from the left needs to play this role. I think Trump is actually pretty easily co-opted. He's got the acceptance and adulation of the right and he is going to crave the same from the left. And, if he makes the right decisions, we should give him lots of appreciation. He responds to that.
That being said, he's going to be surrounded by some pretty nasty people and it's going to be hard to get his ear. Obama might just be the guy -- maybe even a tag team of him and Bill Clinton -- who can break through and influence him.
Being President is unlike any other job in the world, and the members of that excruciatingly exclusive club pay an extraordinary price to participate. Who else in all the world can possibly know what it's like? Who else but an ex-President can possibly know best how to cope with the horrific burden? I'm going to repeat something I posted as a diary over at Booman's:
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I watched the news snippet about Trump's visit to President Obama today, a segment with the two men in the Oval Office after their private meeting of about an hour and a half, and something jumped out at me:
As he sat there listening to the President speak, then made his own remarks, Trump seemed subdued, flattened, weighted down, even. To my eyes and ears, at least, gone was the cocky bravado, the arrogant insouciance of Trump the Winnah!!!!
Indeed, as he ended with speaking of seeking counsel -- counsel! -- from Obama, it hit me: Trump looked like a man who is beginning to realize he's made a terrible mistake.
One wonders what Obama said to him about the burdens and constrictions of the Presidency, how trammeled its seeming powers are in reality, how soul-crushing the daily grind is, how impossible to satisfy the kaleidoscopic jumble of competing demands, how thoroughly it consumes one's life and obliterates one's privacy. One wonders what pants-shitting dilemmas Obama outlined for him, yawning chasms of potential catastrophes he'll have to negotiate, with no straightforward pathways to even modest success.
I daresay, given his apparent ignorance of the very office he's pursued and won, Trump likely never did have more than the vaguest notion of what being President would be like; just a hazy impression of power and glory. Well, now he's beginning to find out what the job actually involves, what's turned President Obama's hair so very gray, so very quickly. I suspect, given what I saw today, the taste of victory is turning a bit ashen in his mouth.
Or at least that's how it seemed to me. I could of course be totally wrong. But I wonder....
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Yeh, I can definitely see Trump turning to Obama, yes, and Bill Clinton too, for counsel. Hell, he may even be smart enough to understand that of all the advisors he'll have swarming around him, they may be the most honest brokers of them all, the only ones he can rely on to give it to him straight rather than working him for their own advantage. After all, all those horrible things he said about them during the campaign were just part of the sales game, right? No hard feelings, guys, right?
'Tis a thin reed indeed to cling to, but I'm grasping it hard for now.
Forgot to add: And Bill and Barack are truly dedicated to the public good so much that they'd be willing to let bygones be bygones and help in any way possible to steer the ship of state as far from all the rocks and reefs and surging kraken as they can.
He isn't compromising, he is simply following what Repugnicons have been forced to promise.
I find it hard to believe anything Trump says. He changes his position depending on how the wind blows.
The key won' be who gets to t-RUMP last.
It'll be who gets to Mike "The Dense" Pence right afterwards. And my guess is that they'll be "The Turtle" McConell, and whoever replaces "Privatizin'" Ryan - if anyone's stupid enough to want to herd rabid honey-badgers on LCD, PCP, and meth.
t-RUMP and Pence:
Talk about two people in over their heads!
An brain-addled Othello with the nuclear codes at his side 24 X 7 X 365, and an incompetent but sure "Christian" boob, Iago
We/ll be lucky to survive another 4 years - if, IF, there'll even be an election then...
Oh, there will be an election. There just will not be enough voting stations in heavily Democratic precincts to let many people actually vote.
This was so early and so public, it's not like the Pence, McConnell & Ryan could miss it.
So now expect them to install a massive program aimed at managing Dump.
Those who have tried to manage Trump have all failed up to now. He hates Ryan, possibly the most decent instinct he's ever had. But I think Obama will be at least able to have Trump talk to him if he wants. More than W would.
This transition period is all about normalizing the fascist takeover.
If they plan on tearing something down, they'll have Dump say he plans to save it.
If they plan on turning American into a publicly built privately operated network of toll bridges and toll road and airports etc., they'll have Dump say his priority is infrastructure.
If they plan on hounding HRC for the rest of her days, including indicting her, they'll have Dump says he's impressed with her strength.
That gives the Dump adm fascists and the R controlled Congress, backed up by the coming permanent majority SCOTUS, the room to operate below the horizon. No one in msm gives a crap for coving budget committee and ways & means committee hearings; it's only when those escalate into "negotiations" conflicts with the admin that the press is interested. THERE WILL BE NO SUCH CONFLICTS NOW.
I can't stand listening to Dump. But the msm is, and will remain, transfixed by his every utterance, and that enthrallment will be deepened & enforced by controlling the one thing msm values over everything else: ACCESS.
It's all in Orwell's Animal Farm: If you say Peace, you mean War. If you say Fairness, you mean to discriminate. If you say Open, you mean Closed.
Dump's role is to emerge down the escalator periodically to say the words that will capture the msm for the cycle.
Then the work can proceed to do what they really are up to: precisely undermining the message in those words.
It's not just the Dems, it's we libs who want 'the best for the most': we're going to try to kick this football again and again and again interminably, in hopes that THIS time Lucy isn't lying. We have no choice: it's not our way to shut it down, to burn it down, to reach for a gun.
So, which is more likely here, with this little image of Hopey Change, of Peace In Our Time?
That Obama is Dump whispering, or
that Dump is setting up his latest grift?
Which of these two options do their respective histories, and the more recent ones of their respective parties, tell us is the One True Picture?
Hitler's mouth was full of teeth all smiley when his meeting with Chamberlain broke up. Have a safe and pleasant trip back to your verdant pastuers ... schmuck.
One thing I'm sure we all remember, in our fashion, is something most of us maybe only saw once, or a few times, at most: the repeated mass marches and protests against Dubya's War in Iraq. Why is our memory of those so fractured & fuzzy? Because the msm didn't cover them.
Watch the msm fail to cover these protests against the Rise of the Dump autocracy & the takeover of everything by the R party unified single-party state.
The longer this goes on, the more it looks like normal, because it WILL be normal. If the Dems, if we libs, in our lib Dem hope delusions, let this go on for one Congressional session, it'll be too late to do anything about it going into the next presidential election. If we fail in 2018, we WILL fail in 2020.
And that'll be it.
Here is why: the largest emerging 'bloc' vote is the hispanic vote. But unlike the black bloc vote, they don't have the history of slavery, of a Civil War over their freedom, of the fight for suffrage, of their own skin color imposing a permanent "J" on them. Hispanics have come in here and settled with almost none of that. They want to work, and see unions as devices used in the past to keep them from working. They want to send their kids to school, and see Charter schools as a way for them to gain entry into Catholic colleges. They and their descendants were not snatched from villages where they had a full culture of their own 300 years or more ago and put into slavery; hispanics have come here from the way more recent existential horrors of Central and South American dictatorships.
Hispanics can, will, and already have voted Republican in sufficient numbers to ensure white supremacy will last way longer than it otherwise would. They have done for much the same reasons Muslim Americans enter the armed forces in numbers, as hispanics have done for generations: to ADAPT, to get on with the American Dream: the White Dream.
I've been to Central & South American countries. I've seen and heard there for myself how being whiter, being more 'true Spanish', is a huge cultural advantage there. That's the DREAM for working class hispanics immigrating into the U.S. - to realize HERE what they could not THERE: to become WHITE.
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