Harkin, a progressive who wanted to see a public option in the health care bill, said he’d "assumed" that President Obama would have been pushing Lieberman (I-CT) at all costs since that’s what Senate Democrats ultimately compromised on to secure Lieberman’s vote.<\/font><\/p>\n "I’m really surprised at that. I would have thought that President Obama, I know he met a number of times with Sen. Lieberman, and Sen. Nelson and others," Harkin said. "I assumed that they were pushing hard for the public option. … The senator said ‘No’ under any circumstance and that’s why we had to do the compromise."<\/font><\/p>\n Lieberman<\/font> told<\/a> Huffington Post his negotiations on the public option were with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.<\/font><\/p>\n From their story:<\/font><\/p>\n "Well, no. I think I got pressure from the president to be for health care reform," Lieberman said when asked by HuffPost about any pressure from the administration to support either the public option or the Medicare buy-in. "I’d have to think about this<\/font><\/strong>, but I didn’t really have direct input from the White House on this."…<\/font><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Inserted from <TPM<\/a>><\/p>\n Now, I\u2019m not saying that it didn\u2019t come down just the way Traitor Joe said it did. Asking him to support the public option would be no more likely to achieve results than presenting the request directly to Aetna\u2019s CEO. However, Traitor Joe is leaving himself and out by saying he have to think about it. Furthermore, my momma had a special word for anyone who bases anything on what a serial lair says: fool.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Progressives have vented considerable ire, based on this claim. Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA) said on MSNBC he was surprised that Sen. Joe Lieberman told reporters the White House didn’t pressure him to support a public option. Harkin, a progressive who wanted to see a public option in the health care bill, said he’d "assumed" that […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-415","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-5-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/415","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=415"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/415\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=415"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=415"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=415"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"asshole_Lieberman\"](\"http:\/\/s217.photobucket.com\/albums\/cc83\/TomCat1948or2\/Blog%202009\/LIEbermanSurprisedHarkin_1092\/asshole_Lieberman.jpg\" "\\"asshole_Lieberman\\"")
<\/a> Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA) said on MSNBC he was surprised that Sen. Joe Lieberman told reporters the White House didn’t pressure him to support a public option<\/strong>.<\/font><\/p>\n