KRISTOLIZED - AT 9:15 A.M. ET:  Bill Kristol takes on President Obama directly, pretty much slicing up the president's performance at last night's "reform health care or die" news conference.  (Charles Krauthammer had actually expected Kristol to be attacked by the president directly because he's been such a thorn in the side of the White House, but Kristol was spared.) Kristol agrees with the overall consensus emerging this morning - that the president didn't change many minds:

President Obama spent most of his press conference tonight denying what President Kennedy famously affirmed -- that to govern is to choose. Obama promised us health care this is at once better and cheaper, with both more regulation and more freedom to choose, featuring an assurance that government won’t limit our care and a commitment to a government panel that will save money by restricting care.

Yeah, that's right.  Obama didn't exactly come off as a detail man.

The juvenile happy talk reached its peak with this presidential statement: “If there's a blue pill and a red pill, and the blue pill is half the price of the red pill and works just as well, why not pay half price for the thing that's going to make you well?” Now, there’s good idea. Why hasn’t anyone else thought of that? For this reform, we need to spend $1 trillion?

No we don't.  And more and more Americans are coming to that conclusion. 

The president exhibits the disdain for the public, and its reasoning, that is typical of some elites:  We, the smart ones, understand things.  We have the grandest conversations at parties.  We talk to experts.  What do those people out there know?  Is there a Marxist reading room in Omaha? 

Kristol also comments on what we discussed at Urgent Agenda in our last post last night - Obama's bizarre entry into a legal case involving a friend of his in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Obama answered a question about his friend Henry Louis Gates’s run-in with the Cambridge cops, after acknowledging “not having been there and not seeing all the facts,” by nonetheless asserting that “the Cambridge police acted stupidly.” Does he really know enough about what happened to say that? Maybe it was Professor Gates who behaved stupidly, or at least arrogantly. He is, after all, a Harvard professor. I was once a Harvard professor, and my instinct is to side with the Cambridge cops. But if I were president of the United States, I might pause before casually accusing other Americans of acting stupidly unless I were confident I knew what I was talking about.

COMMENT:  Kristol nails it.  Let's see how many mainstream commentators express outrage over the president of the United States injecting himself into a local legal dispute involving a friend.  If a Republican had done that, it would have been called obstruction of justice, attempting to influence the outcome of an investigation, and an act of corruption even worse than the "outing" of Valerie Plame.  Remember her?

July 23, 2009