You know that guy. The ObamaCare architect. The one Obama only found about from the media when he began calling American voters stupid. The one who suddenly had nothing to do with ObamaCare despite all the ObamaCare props coming to him from such right-wing extremists as the White House website and CBS News. That would be the guy Obama was using to reference his brilliant ideas.
“You have already drawn some of the brightest minds from academia and policy circles, many of them I have stolen ideas from liberally, people ranging from Robert Gordon to Austan Goolsbee; Jon Gruber; my dear friend, Jim Wallis here, who can inform what are sometimes dry policy debates with a prophetic voice,” Obama tells the audience at a Brookings Institute event in April 2006. The video was highlighted today by Phil Kerpen of American Commitment. One of the ideas Obama would later adopt after discussions with Gruber was a way to conceal the fact that his plan had effectively adopted a tax on insurance plans, one which candidate Obama had specifically campaigned against in 2008. Finally, in another video Gruber credits Obama with bravely looking for ways to make the Cadillac tax work: He said ‘it’s just not going to happen politically. The bill will not pass. How do we manage to get there through phase-ins and other things?’ And we talked about it. He was just very interested in that topic.
I just bet. But then he found out about it only through the media.
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