Over at the Washington Post's Post Partisan blog, the boss didn't stoop to respond to Obama's little jab at him during tonight's press conference--clearly, the boss knows it's not about him--but focused on Obama's disdain for docs and cops:
at press conferences there are often throwaway lines and unscripted moments that are interesting. I was struck by two that seemed to exemplify Obama's easy disdain for the less enlightened among us -- in this case, for family docs and for Cambridge cops. First, Obama offered this example of how doctors make decisions under the current system instead of doing what's in their patients' best interests: Right now, doctors a lot of times are forced to make decisions based on the fee payment schedule that's out there. So if they're looking and you come in and you've got a bad sore throat or your child has a bad sore throat or has repeated sore throats, the doctor may look at the reimbursement system and say to himself, "You know what? I make a lot more money if I take this kid's tonsils out." Does Obama really think pediatricians knowingly order unnecessary tonsillectomies in order to "make a lot more money?" Isn't this a rather casual slander of a lot of doctors? And in any case, is this what's driving up health-care costs?It's probably as likely health-care costs are high because hospitals have too many vice presidents for government relations making $300,000 a year. But I wouldn't think it appropriate for the president to single them out for attack either. Second, Obama answered a question about his friend Henry Louis Gates's run-in with the Cambridge cops, after acknowledging "not having been there and not seeing all the facts," by nonetheless asserting that "the Cambridge police acted stupidly." Does he really know enough about what happened to say that? Maybe it was Professor Gates who behaved stupidly, or at least arrogantly. He is, after all, a Harvard professor. I was once a Harvard professor, and my instinct is to side with the Cambridge cops. But if I were president of the United States, I might pause before casually accusing other Americans of acting stupidly unless I were confident I knew what I was talking about.
Read the whole thing here.