Shortly after Barack Obama addressed a Senate Democratic caucus meeting and urged them to push health care reform forward, two of the chamber’s most progressive members took the president’s closest adviser aside and asked him why the White House wasn’t doing more to help.
Sens. Al Franken (D-Minn.) and Bernie Sanders (I-V.T.) both asked pointed health-care-related questions to senior adviser David Axelrod following Obama’s speech, multiple sources tell the Huffington Post. The gist of their concern was that the administration has not shown enough leadership to get legislation passed through Congress in the wake of the party’s defeat in the Massachusetts Senate election. Franken went first, saying “he really needed to know if the White House was going to lead,” according to one Democratic aide.
Axelrod, by several accounts, didn’t give a response that Franken found sufficient. And as the two continued to talk, Sanders eventually jumped in, echoing Franken’s concerns. Details of what transpired after that are scant. Axelrod, meanwhile, did not immediately return a request for comment.
In expressing their concern, Franken and Sanders become the second and third progressive Democratic senator to critique the White House’s role in the current health care reform debate. In an interview with HuffPost on Thursday, Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), likewise, said that the president’s involvement in negotiations has “dried up” since the Massachusetts election.
