Story highlights
Obama speaking of Gruber and other academics in 2006: "Many of them I've stolen ideas from liberally"
Despite the '06 praise, Obama dismissed Gruber as "some adviser" after Gruber's remarks drew fire
Gruber talked about "the stupidity of the American voter" in videos that surfaced in the last two weeks
President Barack Obama might be trying to distance himself from MIT economist Jonathan Gruber who has drawn heat for saying the “stupidity of the American voter” was a key factor in passing the President’s signature health care law, but in 2006 then-Sen. Barack Obama said he pulled ideas from the academic “liberally.”
Speaking at a Brookings Institution event the same day as Gruber, Obama praised him and other academics as “some of the brightest minds from academia and policy circles, many of them I’ve stolen ideas from liberally,” according to a video reported Monday by The Washington Free Beacon.
Obama goes on to list four of the seven panelists at the April 2006 event, including “Jon Gruber.”
Gruber was hired in 2009 as a consultant to the Obama administration as it began crafting the Affordable Care Act, now commonly known as Obamacare. Gruber netted nearly $400,000 for the year-long job spent modeling the impact of proposals that would later be shaped into Obama’s signature health care law.
Obamacare: Voters, are you stupid?
Democrats have tried to extinguish the scandal that flamed after a half-dozen years-old videos of Gruber surfaced in recent weeks in which he suggests advocates of the law exploited “the lack of economic understanding of the American voter” and said “people are too stupid” to understand the nuances of the law and its language.
Obama on Sunday dismissed Gruber as “some adviser who never worked on our staff” and insisted his administration and other proponents of the law never misled voters about the legislation.
“We had a yearlong debate” Obama said. “The fact that some adviser who never worked on our staff expressed an opinion that I completely disagree with … is no reflection on the actual process that was run.”
Obama is not the first official to walk back on his praise of Gruber.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi claimed outright that she did not “know who he is” and said he “didn’t help write our bill” when in fact she had cited the economist’s work approvingly in 2009 and even mentioned Gruber by name in an interview that same year.
