Krugman: Obama messes up on health care, big time

My big fear about Obama has always been not that he doesn’t understand the issues, but that his urge to compromise — his vision of himself as a politician who transcends the old partisan divisions — will lead him to negotiate with himself, and give away far too much. He did that on the stimulus bill, where he offered an inadequate plan in order to win bipartisan support, then got nothing in return — and was forced to reduce the plan further so that Susan Collins could claim her pound of flesh.

And now he’s done it on a key component of health care reform. What was the point of signaling, right at this crucial moment, that he’s willing to give away the public plan? Let alone doing it at the very moment that he was making such a good case for it?

Maybe there’s a way to recover from this. But it’s up to the health reform activists to stiffen the administration’s spine. Obama may be satisfied with “broad parameters” — but the rest of us aren’t, and have to make that known.

Read more at the Paul Krugman Blog