hite House officials: Obama has 'no plans' to see Kennedy; Secret Service visited compound.
By KAREN TRAVERS and RACHEL MARTIN
Aug. 23, 2009
35 comments
President Obama and his family have arrived on Martha's Vineyard Sunday afternoon, having delayed their vacation by a few hours today to make sure Hurricane Bill had moved past the island.
A tropical storm warning for the Massachusetts coast was cancelled Sunday morning, but the first family will likely bring a frenzy of a different kind to the beach.
Already whispers are swirling that Obama plans to pay a visit to ailing Sen. Ted Kennedy this week in Massachusetts.
Today, the U.S. Secret Service visited the Kennedy compound, ABC News learned -- though the White House said there are "no plans" for an Obama-Kennedy meeting.
Obama has also left behind a political storm in the nation's capital as he takes his week-long vacation.
Besides being an elder statesman for the Democratic Party, Kennedy is considered a champion of health care reform, and his lawmakers have felt his absence from Washington during the debate.
Today on "This Week", Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., Obama's opponent in the 2008 presidential race, suggested Kennedy may have been able to smooth out some of the friction over health care.
"No person in that institution is indispensable, but Ted Kennedy comes as close to being indispensable as any individual I've ever known in the Senate because he had a unique way of sitting down with the parties at a table and making the right concessions, which really are the essence of successful negotiations," McCain said.
"So it's huge that he's absent, not only because of my personal affection for him, but because I think the health care reform might be in a very different place today."
Obama kept fighting battles over health care reform right up until his vacation. He used his weekly address Saturday to defend his highly contested health care plan and refute the claims against it.
"We've all heard the charge that reform will somehow bring about a government takeover of health care," Obama said. "I know that sounds scary to many folks -- it sounds scary to me, too. But here's the thing: It's not true."
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/story?id=8393918
This is so farking exciting!






