FROM THE DEPARTMENT OF “WHAT IF THIS HAD BEEN BUSH,” PART XXXVIII: Charlie Rose and President’s Speechwriters Laugh About ObamaCare Lie:
CHARLIE ROSE: My point is do you have equal impact on serious speeches? Because it’s about style, use of language, etcetera?
JON LOVETT, FORMER OBAMA SPEECH WRITER: I really like, I was very — the joke speeches is the most fun part of this. But the things I’m the most proud of were the most serious speeches, I think. Health care, economic speeches.
JON FAVREAU, FORMER OBAMA SPEECH WRITER: Lovett wrote the line about “If you like your insurance, you can keep it.”
LOVETT: How dare you!
[laughter]
LOVETT: And you know what? It’s still true! No.
Obamacare was originally hatched at the start of 2007 by Favreau and Robert Gibbs, who would later go on to be Obama’s first press secretary, as a way to run to Hillary’s left. Or as Allahpundit wrote in 2013, “Even the transformation of American health care is but a subplot to Hopenchange image-making:”
Soon-to-be-candidate Obama, then an Illinois senator, was thinking about turning down an invitation to speak at a big health care conference sponsored by the progressive group Families USA [in January 2007], when two aides, Robert Gibbs and Jon Favreau, hit on an idea that would make him appear more prepared and committed than he actually was at the moment.
Why not just announce his intention to pass universal health care by the end of his first term?…
“We needed something to say,” recalled one of the advisers involved in the discussion. “I can’t tell you how little thought was given to that thought other than it sounded good. So they just kind of hatched it on their own. It just happened. It wasn’t like a deep strategic conversation.”…
The candidate jumped at it. He probably wasn’t going to get elected anyway, the team concluded. Why not go big?
Once in office, Obama was caught on video at least 35 times saying “If you like your plan, you can keep your plan,” arguably the biggest lie ever told by an American president; one that even the leftwing “Politifact” Website was forced to declare the “lie of the year” for 2013.
And these three are yucking it up this week, even as millions of Americans lost their healthcare plans.
Ben Rhodes, Obama’s fabulist Middle East guru recently bragged to the New York Times how easy it is to manipulate his party’s operatives with bylines because “The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”
Neither do the people feeding them their material; Favreau was the speechwriter who put the dreaded phrase “Peace in our time” into the teleprompter of President Chamberlain’s second inaugural speech.
Incidentally, here’s Favreau, circa 2008, standing to the left of a photo of potentially the next president of the United States, as a friend offers her a beer.
