It’s come to this: New lefty ad hits Obama for broken health-care promises

Blue on blue has never been bluer than this. Take a bow, Jim Geraghty: Your point that all Obama promises come with an expiration date has now gone bipartisan.

Is it really true that The One campaigned on a public option? Nah, says Ben Smith — but Ezra Klein begs to differ:

The White House argues that they didn’t emphasize it in public speeches, and according to Salon’s Alex Koppelmann, that’s true. But speaking as someone who did a lot of reporting on their health-care plan, they emphasized it privately quite a bit. It was, in fact, their answer to a lot of the other flaws in their proposal. So whether Obama used it in his speeches, his campaign purposefully pushed it to, at the least, some reporters, which is to say they worked to ensure that people knew about the public option’s important role in their health-care thinking.

Obama’s latest statement on this is hair-splitting at best and misleading at worst. That’s even more true given how often he mentioned the public option after he got elected. And it’s a good example of why the left is losing its trust in Obama. Obama could have given an interview where he expressed frustration that the math of the Senate forced his administration to give up the public option but nevertheless argued that the rest of the health-care bill was well worth passing. Instead, he’s arguing that he never cared about the public option anyway, which is just confirming liberal suspicions that they lost that battle because the president was never really on their side.

I wonder what else The One was telling them privately that he wasn’t saying publicly, e.g., “Yeah, of course I’m going to pull out of Afghanistan and come out in favor of gay marriage.” They happily voted for a guy whom they assumed was lying outright to centrists to win their votes and now that he’s followed through on a few of those supposed “lies” — or not followed through, in the case of the public plan — they’re broken-hearted. Alas.

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