The Fix: Democrats attempts to get away from Jonathan Gruber, translated
Jonathan Gruber?Doesn't ring a bell.
Jonathan Gruber? Wasn'teven on our staff!
Jonathan Gruber? That guy what a loser. I would never associate with such people.
This is essentially what top Democrats have said about the MIT professor and White House health-care consultant in the wake of the appearance of a video in which he implies the Affordable Care Act passed because of the "stupidity" of the American people. Such efforts to distance oneself from another person, though, often come with a healthy dose of convenient and sometimes misleading verbiage.
Here's a sampling of the distancing, along with what the top Democrats really meant.
(And for further reading on just how much work Gruber did onObamacare, see here.)
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said Thursday that she didn't know who Jonathan Gruber is, but she spoke about him in 2009 in footage surfaced by CSPAN. (CSPAN)
Nancy Pelosi:"I don't know who he is. He didn't help write our bill."
Translation: OK, technically I do know who he is, and I've even cited his work. But we're not buddies. Also, while he was paid $400,000 to consult the White House on the law and played a significant role, he didn't technically write the bill.
The second half of this statement is, again, technically, true. But it masks the fact that Gruber played an important role in the final Obamacare product. Few people involved with the law actually could be described as its author up to and including, probably, Pelosi. But many people had plenty of input and knowledge of its evolution, including Gruber, who specializes in this stuff, after all.
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The Fix: Democrats attempts to get away from Jonathan Gruber, translated