A post on the NYT op-ed blog this morning makes the case for the selling and “repackaging” of Medicare and Medicaid entitlements as possible strategies President Obama and the WH should have taken to push healthcare reform to Republican moderates and right-leaning Independents. Additionally, the post goes on to state, citing a conservative pundit, that Obama’s early attempts at bipartisanship among lawmakers on the Hill as an effort to build healthcare coalitions were a little misguided. The effort should have been focusing on (older) Republican voters — not GOP lawmakers. The result? Populist engagement from the center right of the ideological aisle as a pre-emptive move, of sorts, to keep the more fiscally conservative Republicans from becoming such staunch defenders of Medicare — something that clearly played to the GOP’s strength at the height of townhall hysteria. Is a new push to establish Medicare buy-in the way to go? Perhaps we’ll get a better idea of how the Democrats in the House and Senate plan to attack final votes on a merged bill after the president’s first SOTU address. | LINK

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