Gatesgate just gets worse and worse.
First, Obama lets a minor incident turn into a major distraction from healthcare reform.
Now he thinks he's being clever by claiming that he'll be drinking a Bud when the fellas get together for that beer-drinking group hug at the White House.
Doesn't this just sum up his go-along to get-along approach to the healthcare debate? Instead of staking out a position and sticking to his guns, he thinks he can get his Blue Dog adversaries to like him by...pretending to drink shitty beer?
Obama's Budweiser Healthcare Strategy is a bust. It's signals weakness. 
No doubt, lots of people drink Budweiser.
But none of them brag about it. They drink it because it's cheap and it has something called "Drinkability" - which means you can drink a six-pack and still operate a remote.
Drinking Bud is like watching TV. Sure, millions of people watch TV. Not a single person would think of lisingt it as a "hobby" on a job application.
What is it about Democrats, supposedly the "People's Party," that they have such a problem connecting with average people? That they have to pretend to drink Budweiser to burnish their regular-guy bona fides?
Surely nobody needs healthcare reform more than us Budweiser-drinking, working-class Bubbas. With our high blood pressure, maxxed-out credit cards, job insecurity and pre-existing conditions, we are the most vulnerable to being dropped by for-profit insurance companies. The most likely to lose our jobs, as well as our health insurance. Yet president Arugula cannot seem to make a more convincing case for reform than people who question whether he's even an American citizen and who swap photo-shopped images of him with a bone in his nose.
What us regular guys respect is toughness. We know the odds are against us. We don't like to be bull-shitted. We don't like a guy who starts out saying Single Payer makes the most sense and ends up backing down even on whether there's gonna be some anemic public option. When the president of the United States comes into our living rooms brandishing a bottle of Bud, we smell a rat. We didn't buy Poppy Bush's pork rinds and we don't buy Obama's Budweiser. JFK woulda shown up at one of these photo-ops with a $100 bottle of Sam Adams Utopia and a couple of chilled mugs to pour the other guys a taste of the good stuff.
You wanna be our friend, Mr. President? Get us a health care bill that doesn't allow insurance companies to drop us because we've been swilling Budweiser for 25 years. Much better to swagger into the White House with a nice Oatmeal Stout than to prance around with a bottle of Bud and give in to these sleazebags. Let the sleazebags insult our intelligence. That's what they do. That's what we expect of them. You want to be on our side, Mr. President? Go in there and tell those guys that they're drinking pisswater and that the American people deserve a premium beer - and premium health care.

I see that president Obama is doing another Town Hall meeting on health care reform, today in North Carolina. While I admire the president's dedication to bringing the case for reform to the public, I worry that he is making the mistake of assuming a level playing field, on which a good faith effort on behalf of legislation that makes rational sense is all that is required to win.

That would be a nice world to live in. Unfortunately it's not the one we do live in. The world we live in is infested with highly-paid lobbyists and interest groups who are doing all they can, in cooperation with the mainstream media, to obfuscate the issues and make it impossible for reform to happen. Instead of pretending that these snakes don't exist, the president should be actively shining a light on them and asking for our help in cutting their heads off.
What is lacking in the healthcare reform - an issue that 76% of all Americans support - is passion. Most of us are sitting back, waiting for the inevitable victory of politics as usual. But what if the president got out if front of the issue of reform, showed us who and what is standing in the way of change - and asking us to flood the offending Congressmen and women with emails and letters? What if we felt that our leaders were willing to fight, willing to put their bodies and careers on the line, to get the changes they were elected to implement? As things stand right now, our politicians are not even willing to forego their air-conditioned vacations to get healthcare reform passed. So why should we get in the streets? Why should we put pressure on elected officials if the president himself is not willing to put pressure on them?
What if president Obama went on TV and said something like this:
"My fellow Americans, we have all been watching in frustration as healthcare reform has been whittled down by powerful entrenched interests in Washington. Now Congress says we cannot have a vote before they go on vacation. I need your help in letting members of Congress know that business as usual is not acceptable anymore. Senator Max Baucus of Montana, the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, needs to hear from you on this subject. Henry Waxman, the chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee in the House of Representatives, needs to know that you support a strong public option, and won't accept a bill that lacks one. There are certain key players in the Senate who are holding up reform, such as Senator Diane Feinstein of California. They all need to know there are consequences for opposing the will of the people. Consequences that could lead to them losing their offices. I am certainly expressing this view - but I can't do it alone. I need your help. When the people mobilize and make their views known, they become the most potent political force in the world. But when the people allow themselves to be cowed by the confusion that forces of the status quo can bring to bear, the status quo wins by default. I want you to know that I am fighting every day to overcome these forces of corruption. You can join the fight by going to our website..."
People need to feel that this is a real fight, and that we are not going to fight with one hand tied behind our backs, while our opponents use every dirty trick in the book, impugning not only the president's patriotism, but even his citizenship itself. When people use tactics like that, it makes no sense to pretend that this is a civilized debate among gentlemen. We need hardball tactics, and a leader who knows how to mobilize all the weapons at his command, not a Mr. Nice Guy who spends all his time trying to reassure everyone that he is not a threat.