Yahoo News presents the following explanation for Obama's irrational

[JDPriestly]

behavior on health care:

It's from something called The Stimulus. (Sounds phony to me.)

The same pledge for bipartisan deal-making that got liberals in a tizzy for Obama during the campaign now has them nervous. The President is too deferential, they say, too willing to let Congress battle it out. He should step in and be more assertive, demand that certain parts of his agenda are realized. They say he has been too conciliatory to a host of adversaries, be it the Republicans, the American Medical Association, or the energy behemoths.

But the critics are forgetting something: a little book written by people-skills guru Dale Carnegie, the 1930s classic How to Win Friends and Influence People. Considered the gold standard in people skills for decades, a reread of this book gives us an insight into Obama’s style, and reminds us just how he got the country swooning in the audacity of hope. Looking at the way Obama does business, it is obvious that he is the Dale Carnegie President—a shrewd master of leading people. Just look at the following principles he applies:

More of this nonsense at

http://thestimulist.com/how-to-be-president-and-influence-people/


This argument is well written, but the fact is that Obama is opting for a health care plan that will cost too much and be very unpopular in the end.

Obama wants to feel accepted. He wants to feel good, so he is very good at smiling and compromising. But, he does not seem to understand that he is dealing with forces with which you cannot compromise: greed and heartlessness and impersonal corporations.

The philosophy of winning friends and influencing people assumes that you are dealing with human beings. Obama is not dealing with human beings but with inhuman corporations that in the past have not hesitated to allow people to die rather than make good on promises of health care coverage.

When employees represent big companies, they set their hearts aside and do their jobs. It is not human to human; it is company to human. Anyone who has ever argued with a credit card company that has raised its rates knows how that works. The "human being" at the other end has very specific limitations about how much they can "help" you. And that how much is probably just enough to keep you hooked on their credit care scheme, but not enough to make you solvent.

Obama has forgotten that the people he is dealing with, who are no doubt delightful, wonderful individuals, are not in control. They are acting as agents of a cruelly impersonal corporation and the only value of that corporation is making lots of money. To keep their jobs and their company's profits, these people lie and cheat. And they justify this by telling themselves that all's fair in love and war and big business. And it is -- at least as our system works today.

Obama should be ashamed of himself for not understanding the nature of what he is dealing with.

Correction: not from Yahoo. It's from the Stimulus. I am very sorry. I received an e-mail on my Yahoo account and thought the article was from Yahoo.

[Laelth]

1. I like your analysis after the excerpt.

It seems Obama is good at the making friends part (by giving Corporations what they want), and really bad at the "influencing people" part (except to the extent he influenced us to vote for him and donate money to him).

:dem:

-Laelth