Obama speechwriter gets tired of pretending and gives up
This post basically writes itself, so I won’t be adding too much commentary. Here’s what Wendy Button, who used to be a speechwriter for the ultra liberal prez, publicly released earlier:
“What makes this a double blow is that my experience contradicts so much of what I wrote for political leaders over the last decade. That’s a terrible feeling, too. I typed line after line that said everything Massachusetts did would make health insurance more affordable. If I had a dollar for every time I typed, “universal coverage will lower premiums,” I could pay for my own health care at Massachusetts’s rates.
How could all of these weeks and months go by and no one is examining and talking about what has worked and what hasn’t worked in Massachusetts?
My experience in politics has been any time a politician says $500 billion will come from “waste, fraud, and abuse” that’s a fancy way of saying, “Hold on to your wallet; we’ll pay for it later.” We have to be careful about how we spend this trillion dollars. Right now, we are $1.4 trillion in the hole and the Senate has been asked to raise the country’s debt ceiling to $12 trillion. We are fighting two wars and may increase troop levels in one. We have 250 new Iraq and Afghanistan veterans seeking care from VA facilities every day, and unemployment is headed north, past 10 percent. Has anyone else thought, “Hey wait a minute? Why are we proposing to spend so much on a mess of a plan?”
I want health care reform. I need it, but I want Washington to start over. It doesn’t make me “un-American” or “astroturf” or “racist.” I’m a critic because what Washington is talking about doing has made health insurance unaffordable in Massachusetts.“
Wendy Button has written for John Edwards, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Barack Obama, and Mayor Tom Menino of Boston as well as other national and international leaders, and is working on a book.
