Health Care Battle Stymies Obama Campaign Machine

Organizing for America struggles to become force for policy activism

(NEWSER) - For Jeremy Bird, deputy director of Organizing for America, the battle for health care reform takes the shape of the numerous meetings he’s had with discouraged volunteers across Wisconsin this weekend. The OFA network is smaller and underfunded compared with its campaign-era version, and volunteers feel “outshouted” by conservative activists. For each group of OFA members, Bird has had just 90 minutes to restore their optimism, the Washington Post reports. More»

White House struggles to regain message control

(NEWSER) - President Obama urged the grassroots activists who helped him so much in the presidential campaign to do the same in the health care debate, Politico reports. “Now come on," the president told members of Organizing for America in a conference call today. "The best ambassadors for true information, is all of you. You have more credibility than anybody on television when it comes to your friends and your neighbors.” More»

Long arguments will require 'enormous endurance'

(NEWSER) - It's a big day in Washington as the Supreme Court prepares for the opening arguments over President Obama's health care law . Teams of lawyers on both sides have been deep in preparation, staging mock arguments that have nearly drained the city of attorneys up for playing the role of justices, the New York Times reports. The case will be an "enormous endurance challenge" for the two lawyers at the heart of the case, says a former acting solicitor general. More»

President's miscalculations include scale, momentum

(NEWSER) - Scott Brown’s Senate victory in Massachusetts is the final nail in the coffin of the Obama administration’s first-year political strategy, John F. Harris and Carol E. Lee write for Politico . The miscalculations cover “three major counts":

• Believing 2008 was a game-changer: The Obama team thought the "election represented something seismic." But "the assumption that Obama would be swimming mostly with the current rather than often against it on issues such as health care, financial regulation and global warming was naive in retrospect."

President calls liberal congressman to carp about criticism

(NEWSER) - John Conyers hasn't been shy about what he sees as the president's failings, and his remarks seem to have struck a nerve. “I’ve been saying I don’t agree with him on Afghanistan, I think he screwed up on health care reform, on Guantánamo," said the long-serving liberal congressman. “Obama called me and told me that he heard that I was demeaning him, and I had to explain to him that it wasn't anything personal, it was an honest difference on the issues." More»