by John McCormick
INDEPENDENCE, Iowa – With the Iowa caucuses less than three weeks away, it is hyper-rapid-response time. Consider the comments of Sen. Barack Obama this morning inside an event and auction center here.
Less than a day after former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards suggested Obama is too conciliatory in his leadership approach, Obama shot back his own, clearly prepared retort.
Edwards, campaigning Friday in a northeast Iowa town that Obama visited at roughly the same time, suggested the Illinois Democrat’s proposed leadership style would not serve him well in reforming health care and fixing other problems.
“He talks about bringing drug companies, insurance companies … to the table and working with them and negotiating and compromising,” Edwards said Friday. “I just think that’ll never work. If that would work, it would have worked years ago. If that worked, we’d have universal health care. We don’t.”
Obama often suggests he would form a “big table” that would include all interests involved in the health care issue when trying to tackle the matter, although he emphasizes that the insurance industry and drug companies would not be able to buy all the chairs.
But that seems to leave Edwards curious about whether such an approach would really work, considering the more people at the table, the harder it often is to make a decision on even something as simple a pizza flavor, much less health care reform.
Would it yield incremental change or the major change Obama is promising? Voters will soon get to decide.
In the meantime, here is Obama’s response to Edwards:
“He argued that, that, you know, Barack, the problem is he thinks you can negotiate with insurance companies and drug companies … You know what, the key to getting this done is to empower the American people, but you also have to have negotiations and you have to be able to listen. Otherwise, stuff is not going to happen….The notion that they will have no say so at all, is just not realistic. It’s just not true.”
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