Republicans' Obamacare Stance Is 'Height Of Hypocrisy,' House Democrats Say

Obama didn't court or pressure anybody.  He didn't need to - He passed ACA through reconciliation.  What he could have done was pressure Lieberman, Ben Nelson, Mary Landrieu (he does buy them when he wants their votes badly enough), but Obama didn't do that for real healthcare reform legislation.  

During the healthcare legislatio­n debacle, Obama (and his 'most ardent admirers') excused his failure to lead the fight for single payer/publ­ic option with, "Writing the legislatio­n is Congress's job -- I'm staying out of it".  

We learned later that Obama had been undercutti­ng the congressio­nal committees working on the legislatio­n by crafting secret deals with the insurance and pharmaceut­ical industries that Congress would be locked into.  
 
Obama's job in this and all issues, any president'­s job, is to ratchet up support/op­position to pressure members of Congress into doing the president'­s bidding.   It's to shape opinion in the public, intercede directly with the American people, to get them to bring pressure to bear on their elected representa­tives in Congress.  What Obama did was disband the grassroots, had them stand down.  Read Sam Graham-Fel­sen's oped in WaPo: Why is Obama leaving the grass roots on the sidelines?

Obama didn't use that power to achieve on behalf of them that brung 'im:  The Democratic base.  

If the objective is to get affordable, quality medical treatment for everyone, everything pales next to single payer.   And Obama had to get that off the table, at the very beginning, to make sure that the next best method (a public option) wasn't going to be a "compromise" position.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost