It's called tossing a bone. As in an effort to call off the dogs.
President Obama:
The president said he is still open to hearing some of the Republicans ideas for how to “tweak and make improvements” on the health care system, and mentioned one by name by way of example .
“The 1099 provision in the health care bill appears to be too burdensome for small businesses. It just involves too much paperwork, too much filing. It's probably counterproductive. It was designed to make sure that revenue was raised to help pay for some of the other provisions. But if it ends up just being so much -- so much trouble that small businesses find it difficult to manage, that's something that we should take a look at."
Harry Reid:
" If there's some tweaking we need to do with the healthcare bill, I'm ready for some tweaking," Reid said in an interview on CNN, after Republicans captured the U.S. House of Representatives in Tuesday's midterm elections.
And the media is taking up the term..
Reuters channels Reid:
Republican wins could push healthcare tweaks | Reuters
And NPR has already decided that only "tweaks" to Obamacare are possible:
SIDE EFFECTS: Tweaks To Health Law Likely; Repeal Not
Apparently NPR was too fixated on Juan Williams to notice what the election was all about: George Will provides a take on why "tweaks" are simply the opening bid of the Left to hold on to their taxpayer subsidized sand castles:
The progressive agenda is actually legitimated by the incomprehension and anger it elicits: If the people do not resent and resist what is being done on their behalf, what is being done is not properly ambitious. If it is comprehensible to its intended beneficiaries, it is the work of insufficiently advanced thinkers.Of course the masses do not understand that the only flaw of the stimulus was its frugality, and that Obamacare's myriad coercions are akin to benevolent parental discipline. If the masses understood what progressives understand, would progressives represent a real vanguard of progress?...
Will concludes:
Don Boudreaux agreed that interest-group liberalism has indeed been leavened by idea-driven liberalism. Which is the problem.
"These ideas," Boudreaux says, "are almost exclusively about how other people should live their lives. These are ideas about how one group of people (the politically successful) should engineer everyone else's contracts, social relations, diets, habits, and even moral sentiments." Liberalism's ideas are "about replacing an unimaginably large multitude of diverse and competing ideas . . . with a relatively paltry set of 'Big Ideas' that are politically selected, centrally imposed, and enforced by government, not by the natural give, take and compromise of the everyday interactions of millions of people."
This was the serious concern that percolated beneath the normal froth and nonsense of the elections: Is political power - are government commands and controls - superseding and suffocating the creativity of a market society's spontaneous order? On Tuesday, a rational and alarmed American majority said "yes."
