Bohlinger: Harry Reid told me not to run for U.S. Senate

HELENA - Former Montana Lt. Gov. John Bohlinger said U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev) told him not to run for the U.S. Senate next year, saying he didn't want to see a Democratic primary in the race for the seat being vacated by Max Baucus (D-MT).

Bohlinger, now a Democrat after previously holding state office as a Republican, said that on November 6th, the day after he announced his candidacy, he received a phone call from Reid, saying current Lt. Gov. John Walsh was his choice for the ticket.

"And he said, you know, ‘John, you know, you're a nice guy, but we've chosen Walsh. We'd like you to drop out. We don't want to have a primary,'" Bohlinger said. "And I said, ‘Senator, we're going to have a primary in Montana. And it will be the people of Montana that choose the next Democratic Senatorial candidate.'"

Bohlinger said the pair visited on the phone for about 10 or 15 minutes. In the end, Reid wished him good luck and said to call him if he needed any help.

Reid's office did not respond to a request for comment on the matter Monday.

Bohlinger criticized similar such meddling involvement in the primary by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, which has voiced support for Walsh and has the ability to connect candidates with campaign funds.

He said former Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer-the Democrat with whom Bohlinger served in the statehouse as Republican lieutenant governor from 2005 until this year-told him his first call should be to Guy Cecil, executive director of the DSCC, to see if there was support for his candidacy.

But the DSCC said it had already decided to support Walsh, according to Bohlinger.

"And I said, "It's inappropriate for the DSCC to involve themselves in primaries," Bohlinger said. "It's the people of the state of Montana who will choose the next Democratic Senatorial candidate, not the political insiders in Washington, D.C. I'm really surprised that they would do something like that."

Via: KBZK, Bozeman, MT

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Sebelius: If We Delay Obamacare People Will Die of Cancer or Diabetes…

Lead author of Obamacare law criticizes administration over rollout

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A senior Democratic senator who served as a lead author of President Barack Obama's healthcare law criticized the administration on Wednesday for failing to alert lawmakers to problems that led to the program's troubled rollout.

Senator Max Baucus, chairman of the U.S. Senate Finance Committee, who worried openly in April that the rollout could become "a train wreck" said he has been disappointed to hear administration officials say they didn't see problems with the federal healthcare website HealthCare.gov coming.

"When we asked for updates on the marketplaces, the responses we got were totally unsatisfactory. We heard multiple times that everything was on track. We now know that was not the case," he told U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius at an oversight hearing.

But Baucus also sounded a conciliatory note, saying he wanted to avoid assigning blame. "That's in the past," Baucus said. "Now it's time to move forward and figure out how to fix it."

Under the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, it is mandatory for everyone to have health insurance or pay a fine. Republicans oppose the plan on the grounds that it is an unwarranted expansion of the federal government.

The administration is working around-the-clock with the help of outside tech advisers to resolve problems that have plagued HealthCare.gov since it opened on October 1 and reduced an expected flood of new enrollees to a trickle.

Via: Chicago Tribune

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No Drama Obama’s Dramatic 2012 Reelection Campaign

The press liked to call their style No Drama Obama. 

It was a nice turn of phrase that matched the mood of the candidate in 2008. 

But that all changed with the reelection. The personal tensions started earlier and rapidly worsened. They fought in private and in the open. There was plenty of simmering, and often a high boil. The team of rivals rarely achieved a spirit of cooperation and seemed more inclined to bitter, dogged rivalries. 

There was a new actor in the campaign drama: Jim Messina. Obama convinced Messina to leave his political father, Sen. Max Baucus, by calling him the day after Hillary Clinton dropped out of the Democratic primary contest. The sales pitch was neither about hope nor change. “You’re really going to get to run a business,” Obama told Messina. 

Seven days later, Messina was in Chicago with control of the campaign staff and its budget. On his first day at work, David Plouffe handed him a list of half a dozen people.

“Fire them,” Plouffe said.

So he did. Messina would introduce himself to bemused staffers and ask them to visit his office for a second or two. That was the last conversation they would have with him at campaign headquarters. Other staffers might be unhappy at taking the ax to new coworkers; Messina was not one of them. He was in Chicago to bring some order to an operation that had outlived the structure of the primaries. If that meant he was unpopular, so be it.

Just five months after President Obama signed his historic health-​care reform into law, he shared his armored limo with Messina in Seattle, where they had traveled for an event to help reelect Sen. Patty Murray.

Via: The Daily Beast,

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The Collapse of the Obama Presidency

How bad has 2013 been for Barack Obama? Let us count the ways.

In the first year of his second term, the president has failed on virtually every front. He put his prestige on the line to pass federal gun-control legislation–and lost. He made climate change a central part of his inaugural address–and nothing has happened. The president went head-to-head with Republicans on sequestration–and he failed. He’s been forced to delay implementation of the employer mandate, a key feature of the Affordable Care Act. ObamaCare is more unpopular than ever, and it’s turning out to be a “train wreck” (to quote Democratic Senator Max Baucus) in practice. The most recent jobs report was the worst in a year, with the Obama recovery already qualifying as a historically weak one. Immigration reform is going nowhere. And then there’s Syria, which has turned out to be an epic disaster. (To be sure, Mr. Obama’s Middle East failures go well beyond Syria–but Syria is the most conspicuous failure right now).

In watching the Obama presidency dissolve before our eyes, there is a cautionary tale to be told. Every presidency falls short of the expectations that the candidate sets. But no man has ever promised more and delivered less than the current occupant of the Oval Office.

All of the extravagant promises and claims–of “Yes We Can!” and “we’re the ones we’ve been waiting for;” of hope and change and slowing the rise of the oceans; of claiming his candidacy would “ring out across this land as a hymn that will heal this nation, repair this world, make this time different than all the rest”–lie in ruin. (I’d urge you to watch this short video clip from the 2008 campaign  to more fully appreciate the crushing disappointment that results from what Mr. Obama said he would achieve versus what he’s been able to achieve.)

Via: Commentary Magazine

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