ABC News’ Rick Klein reports: Disappointment from the “Netroots” has been an early and repeated theme of President Obama’s time in office, with sharp disagreements between the White House and the political left over such areas as health care, gay rights, Afghanistan, Iraq, and civil liberties.
Those tensions reached a new blogospheric boiling point over the weekend, after CNBC’s John Harwood quoted an anonymous White House adviser’s reaction to the “Internet left fringe.” The adviser, Harwood said, told him that “those bloggers need to take off the pajamas, get dressed and realize that governing a closely divided country is complicated and difficult.”
On ABCNews.com’s “Top Line” today, liberal blogger Jane Hamsher (not wearing pajamas) told us that the comment is emblematic of a White House that isn’t respecting the liberal activists who worked to elect Obama president. Many of those same liberals are dismayed to see a White House waffling in its commitment that a health care plan will include a “public option” to compete with private insurers.
“The White House very regularly calls bloggers ‘the left of the left,’ ignoring the fact that the majority of the country, 77 percent, wants a public option. This isn’t some fringe, lefty, loony thing,” said Hamsher, the founder of the liberal blog FireDogLake.
“[I]take it as a mark of pride for my profession that we’re being called Cheeto-eaters this morning,” Hamsher said. “We’re an independent political movement. We’re progressives, and progressives in the House are dismissed, progressives online are dismissed. You know, progressive values, progressive groups are only allowed access to the White House to the extent that they’re willing to torpedo progressive legislation.”
She added, “It’s not that we‘re some part of the Democratic Party that deserves respect. We’ve always had an independent political voice from the Democrats.”
Hamsher’s latest venture will test that proposition. Public Option Please is seeking to harness some of the same online energy that fueled Obama’s campaign to insist to lawmakers that a public option be included in a health care bill.
Marshall Ganz, a legendary figure in political organizing who helped design the Obama campaign’s field program in 2008, is helping Hamsher and her allies at Public Option Please find ways to make sure their voices are heard inside Washington.
“Ganz … said all along that Obama would not have been elected had he campaigned on politics of narrow self-interest,” Hamsher said. “And that that’s where the conversation about health care reform has taken place. We’re talking about bending the cost curve, and what we should be talking about is health care as a human right.”
“So we’re reaching out to young people, and trying to reach them through art, through music, you know, through other means to take hold and shape their own future,” she added. “And Obama, you know, sort of inspired that during the campaign, and then got into realpolitiks very fast. So that emotion had no place to go, and so we’re picking that up.”
Hamsher also promised to bring more pressure on Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., to bring a vote on the public option to the Senate floor: “This whole idea that they’re going to water down the public option so that they don’t put Democratic senators in the position of having to actually state that they will filibuster is ridiculous. No. If they’re going to filibuster, make them say so. Nobody will say so for a reason. It is unprecedented. So the idea that we’re just going to sell this out to keep them from that uncomfortable position is not going to happen. And Harry Reid needs to start taking people’s gavels away [stripping committee chairmen of their titles] if it does happen.”
Harwood’s reporting sparked widespread anger among liberal bloggers, and prompted the White House to do some damage control today.
White House deputy communications director Dan Pfeiffer told Greg Sargent, of The Plum Line blog: “That sentiment does not reflect White House thinking at all, we’ve held easily a dozen calls with the progressive online community because we believe the online communities can often keep the focus on how policy will affect the American people rather than just the political back-and-forth.”
Click HERE for the full interview with Jane Hamsher.
We also checked in with Politico’s Ben Smith (another blogger who, for the record, joined us fully and well-dressed), on the insurance industry’s last-ditch attempt to scuttle a health care bill, and tomorrow’s critical vote in the Senate Finance Committee.
We also got into some handicapping of the mayoral race in New York City, where Democrats have been unable to muster much outrage against Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s attempt for a third term — a move that required him to get the City Council to toss out term limits for city officials.
Watch tht full interview with Ben Smith HERE.
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