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- May 22, 2010
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(NPR)- Democrats are still deciding the direction to take following what President Obama described as a shellacking.
Richard Wolffe, for one, knows something about the way they operate from the inside. He interviewed Obama and the presidents senior staff for his new book, Revival: The Struggle for Survival Inside the Obama White House, which tracks an intense period around the presidents first anniversary in office.
Wolffe has spoken to people in the White House since the midterms about where they think they went wrong.
.Wolffe writes that Obama was holding back tears when he finally signed the health care bill. He says that it helps answer an important question: why Obama stubbornly insisted on moving forward with the health care overhaul when others advised against it.
This was clearly a decision that his own chief of staff didnt agree with, and there were other senior advisers who thought this was insane, lunatic, to risk the presidency on it, Wolffe says. And it comes down to the memory of his mother.
So, his mother passed away because of cancer. Her experience in her final days and months was about struggling with insurance companies over the question of pre-existing conditions. And if you listen to the president, what does he talk about most? Wolffe says. Its about insurance companies quibbling with patients about pre-existing conditions.
And he tears up its strange that people didnt kind of notice it in all of the hullabaloo around the signing in the East Room, he can barely keep it together. And thats very, very rare to see a president, especially this president, who is struggling, fighting with himself, to hold back the tears.
Rest here>>>
Richard Wolffe, for one, knows something about the way they operate from the inside. He interviewed Obama and the presidents senior staff for his new book, Revival: The Struggle for Survival Inside the Obama White House, which tracks an intense period around the presidents first anniversary in office.
Wolffe has spoken to people in the White House since the midterms about where they think they went wrong.
.Wolffe writes that Obama was holding back tears when he finally signed the health care bill. He says that it helps answer an important question: why Obama stubbornly insisted on moving forward with the health care overhaul when others advised against it.
This was clearly a decision that his own chief of staff didnt agree with, and there were other senior advisers who thought this was insane, lunatic, to risk the presidency on it, Wolffe says. And it comes down to the memory of his mother.
So, his mother passed away because of cancer. Her experience in her final days and months was about struggling with insurance companies over the question of pre-existing conditions. And if you listen to the president, what does he talk about most? Wolffe says. Its about insurance companies quibbling with patients about pre-existing conditions.
And he tears up its strange that people didnt kind of notice it in all of the hullabaloo around the signing in the East Room, he can barely keep it together. And thats very, very rare to see a president, especially this president, who is struggling, fighting with himself, to hold back the tears.
Rest here>>>
