Last week, former Senator and GOP Presidential candidate Bob Dole went public endorsing President Obama’s attempt to reform healthcare. Dole did so over already existing objections by Mitch McConnell and other Republicans. It spite of those objections, Dole publicly issued a joint statement with Tom Daschle saying:
The American people have waited decades, and if this moment passes us by, it may be decades more before there is another opportunity
Dole further personally reiterated a previous statement made to the Kansas City Star, to the effect
I don’t want the Republicans putting up a ‘no’ sign and saying, ‘We’re not open for business.
Well that was then; this is now. Now, as of yesterday, less than five days after Dole issued a joint ballyhooed statement to the press supporting Obama’s effort to reform healthcare, he suddenly does not want his words used in an advertisement supporting Obama’s effort to reform healthcare. The Sunday New York Times reports:
At the request of former Senator Bob Dole, Democrats are scrapping plans to broadcast a new commercial that touted Republicans like Mr. Dole speaking in support of overhauling the health-care system.
Mr. Dole lodged a complaint with the White House Saturday night, saying that the new commercial, set to run on national broadcast stations on Monday but available online on Saturday, was deceptive.
“He believes it is deceptive, it was not authorized, and he asked that it be pulled,” Michael Marshall, a spokesman for Mr. Dole, said Sunday morning. “He was told late last night by the White House that it would not run.”
The ad has now been pulled not just from broadcast and cable, but from the internet as well. Except the ad was shown on the Sunday news shows and FDL has it. Take a look, the entire Bob Dole part of the ad lasts less than five seconds and consists of a stock still of Dole and a voice over of his printed earlier statement to the Kansas City Star in the exact words
I want this to pass – we have got to do something.
It was a public statement, given to a newspaper of record, on the record, and Bob Dole has the unmitigated gall to demand that the ad be yanked as being “deceptive”??
And the White House leaped into action immediately and killed the ad??? Simply amazing.
This candy ass bufoonery from the same White House that routinely insults and demeans its own activist base that got it elected and is busting their rears to get meaningful healthcare reform passed.
With this type of consistently weak tea, not to mention the wholesale sell out to the healthcare lobby interests, it is little wonder the reform effort is floundering. If only those little blue pills Dole shills for would work on his, and the White House’s, spine.
