Iraq Co-Study Chairman Lee Hamilton and Former Senator Chuck Hagel spoke with CBS Early Show anchor Harry Smith about where U.S. focus should be in Afghanistan.
Obama's 'civil' town halls: No Austin, TX
by Mark Silva
Today, it's the Grand Canyon.
Tomorrow, it's the Veterans of Foreign Wars.
But last night, for a traveling President Barack Obama, it was another "town hall'' on health care. In Grand Junction, Colo., with the second of the president's western meetings with the public tucked into a weekend of family sightseeing at the great national parks, Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon. The president plans to address the veterans at their convention in Phoenix on Monday before returning to Washington to confront another hot week in the great health-care reform debate of 2009.
But after a week of town halls staged in New Hampshire, Montana and Colorado, with the president suggesting that health-care reform is "80 percent'' thereit's the remaining 20 percent of the debate that poses the biggest hurdlethe White House figures that it has accomplished at least one thing out on the hustings:
"I think we've proved we can have a civil town hall meeting,'' Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, said aboard Air Force One last night en route to Phoenix after the president's town hall in Colorado.
"'d point out that Grand Junction is a place where we got about 35 percent of the vote out of 100, so it's not exactly Austin, Texas,'' Gibbs joked. "So I think it proves that people want to have a genuine discussion about the issues. I know the president was happy with both events (in Colorado and Montana) and felt like it gave him an opportunity to talk about what's at stake.
The president also got personal last night, as he has before, invoking the story of his own grandmother's recent death in the context of the swirling questions about end-of-life care in the health-care initiatives moving through the House and under debate in a Senate committeethe government, he says, is not going after "grandma.''
"There has been a tremendous amount of misinformation,'' Gibbs said. "I'm sure some of it is logically explained. I think some of it is, as I've said many times before, perpetuated on purpose despite the fact that people know the truth by people who ought to be smarter than that.
"I think the president invoked the image because, as he said in the answer, it's ludicrous to think somebody who had struggled with losing a grandparent, one that meant so much to his development and upbringing, only a day before -- only hours before he's elected president -- the notion that he would then go around proposing something as has been discussed by people who know better is crazy,'' he said. "So I think it gave him another opportunity to discuss it.''
And, in a season of congressional town hall meetings that have gotten out of order in some venues, this is hardly the end of the president's own attempt at "civil'' town halls to promote the initiatives that he will ask the House and Senate to approve when they return in September.
"I think he'll spend a decent amount of time on the road, yes,'' said Gibbs, en route to the Grand Canyon
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