Obama Takes on His Critics

President Obama survived his first town hall. "For all the scare tactics out there, what is truly scary is if we do nothing,” Obama told the audience in Portsmouth, which was mostly friendly. He addressed his critics directly, accusing them of creating “boogeymen." “Where we disagree, let's disagree over things that are real, not these wild misrepresentations that don't bear any resemblance to anything that's actually being proposed,” he said. He directly addressed Sarah Palin’s allegation that the bill would create “death panels,” saying that his bill would offer counseling about end-of-life care, living wills, and hospice care, if patients wanted it. It would not, he said “basically pull the plug on grandma because we decided that it's too expensive to let her live anymore.”