John Conyers: “I’m tired of saving Obama’s can”

Via the NYT Prescriptions blog:

“I’m getting tired of saving Obama’s can in the White House,” Mr. Conyers, one of the most liberal members of the House and chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said in a radio interview on “The Bill Press Show.”

“I mean, he only won by five votes in the House, and this bill wasn’t anything to write home about,” Mr. Conyers said of the health care legislation that the House passed on Nov. 7. “The public option is only available — which is the only way you manage cost and give some competition to 1,300 other health insurance companies — the only way he could have got that through is that progressives held their nose and voted for the plan anyway.”

Mr. Conyers also complained that the idea of a single-payer system had been “taken off the table from the beginning.”

Asked if the president had shown enough leadership on health care, Mr. Conyers said, “Of course not, of course not.”

“You know,” he added, “holding hands out, and beer on Friday nights in the White House, and bowing down to every nutty right-wing proposal about health care, and saying on occasion that public options aren’t all that important, is doing a disservice to the Barack Obama that I first met, who was an ardent single-payer enthusiast himself.”

Bbbbut I thought that Obama “never” was a proponent of single-payer? Ooops …

Trouble in paradise?