Obama the fox?

You know, I could be completely wrong, but I really believe that President Obama is executing a long-standing plan with respect to his handling of the health care brouhaha. Let me give you an analogy from my world:

In the old days, when I began practice as a young lawyer, all trials were assigned out of the “master calendar department” by the Presiding Judge. Sometimes you would “get out to trial,” but often there would be no courts available so your case would “trail” or be continued to a date weeks away. I learned from a mentor that you NEVER gave the opposing counsel your trial brief unless you actually got assigned to a department and the case started. At that point you would lay your trial brief on the other side. If you did give the opposing counsel your trial brief in master calendar and then your case got trailed, or worse, continued, the other guy would have lots of time to construct all sorts of opposition, including false or misleading arguments that would take you lots of time and energy to shoot down. Even today, when we don’t have a master calendar system, I never give the other side anything until the very last minute before the statutory or procedural deadline. Why give them any more time to beat you up than you need to?

Could it be that the President is sitting back and letting the other side “file their trial brief” in public, letting them get it all out, getting them backed into their loony corner before he files his trial brief? If he would have gotten overly specific or tried to respond point-by-point to the lies and distortions, they would have weeks to attack those responses, which he would then have to react to, and so on. Imagine he had tried that approach on the Jeremiah Wright matter in the campaign. Instead, he let the criticism go on until he was sure the other side had” filed their trial brief,” then, and only then, he made his famous “race” speech. (Which I believe will be studied long after we and Barack are gone).

Obama and the men and women who got him elected are just too smart to not have something up their sleeve, but you can be dam sure they are not going to pull it out of the sleeve until the are sure that

• The other side has filed its trial brief
• The timing is right to get full benefit from filing their trial brief , and the least amount of time is left for the other side to react.

I could be wrong, but I don’t think so. What will Barack’s “trial brief" be? A major speech like the race speech where he lays out the shame and cost of having 50 million of our fellow citizen uninsured, and the undeniable benefit to all but a few very rich people? An orchestrated blitz using popular and articulate people like Bill Clinton, Howard Dean, etc.? Forcing the opposing Senators to actually filibuster – let’s see them standing up for days or even weeks obstructing a bill whose benefit all will be able to see?

I don’t know, but I am waiting