Jon Stewart came down on the Obama administration last night for going off message when talking about health care reform. The president has taken heat from protesters and pundits alike over the past several weeks for his "public option" plan which would provide a government-run alternative to private health insurance. On Saturday Obama's message wavered when he responded to a question in Grand Junction, Colorado by saying, "...The public option, whether we have it or we don't have it, is not the entirety of health care reform. This is just one sliver of it, one aspect of it."
The next day Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of Health and Human Services, made a similar statement on CNN saying the public option is "not the essential element" of the administration's plan. But White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs and Linda Douglass, communications director for the White House Office of Health Reform, still insist the public option is necessary.
Stewart suggested that the health care debate is getting to the president and that he should learn from the Bush administration who got us into a war no one wanted by staying strictly on message.
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