None of the above: What derailed Obamacare?
Salon.com’s Thomas Schaller isn’t sure what derailed Obamacare. That’s evidenced by his string of questions in his latest column. Here’s the list of questions:
Was the White House’s public relations rollout insufficient to counter the stronger-than-anticipated resistance from healthcare opponents? Was the public option always just a bargaining chip to give away in exchange for what the president really wants? What happened to the vaunted Obama campaign apparatus, which was supposed to morph into a machine delivering support for Obama’s agenda? Did Obama simply lack the political will or political capital? Or should he have been less of a consensus seeker and more of a Rove-ian steamroller?
The simple explanation is that it’s none of the above. Obamacare failed because the American people found out what’s in H.R. 3200. The minute they did is the minute they turned on Obamacare. It didn’t have anything to do with packaging. It isn’t that President Obama didn’t have the political will.
When objective people look back at this, they’ll agree that CBO Director Elmendorf’s testimony torpedoed any chance of passing the wide-ranging reforms that President Obama wanted. Here’s what Director Elmendorf said during testimony:
Under questioning from Chairman Kent Conrad, D-N.D., Elmendorf told the Senate Budget Committee that the congressional proposals released so far do not meet that second test.
“In the legislation that has been reported, we do not see the sort of fundamental changes that would be necessary to reduce the trajectory of federal health spending by a significant amount and, on the contrary, the legislation significantly expands the federal responsibility for health care costs,” he said.
Another thing that hurt the Democrats’ chances for passing this bill was President Obama’s increasing unpopularity. He portrayed himself as a moderate, a post-racial, post-partisan healer who believed in transparency, accountability and puppies. Now he’s seen as just another liberal with a better than average speaking ability.
When it comes to selling transformational changes to the most personal of all domestic policies, salesmanship isn’t what matters. Substance is what matters. Still, Democrats can’t resist blaming the people who couldn’t block anything mathematically:
Apparently, Obama is no LBJ (presidential version), either. Given the reflexive Republican biting of Obama’s extended hand, perhaps the president should have dispensed from the start with any serious effort to find accommodation with the GOP. The White House could have spoken otherwise for public consumption, but it should have assumed all along that this would be a Democratic-led proposal. Instead of wasting energy on trying to persuade Republicans, it could have worked over dissenting Democrats in the Senate, and had a better shot at jamming the public option through.
The notion that President Obama reached out to Republicans in anything more than a token way is laughable. Having them up to the White House, saying a few flowery words about bipartisanship, then restarting the partisanship the minute the GOP leadership has left the building isn’t bipartisanship. It’s an empty photo-op.
2. Obama misplayed his hand by failing to properly explain what the public option is, how it works, who will have to pay for it, and, most of all, to show that he’s prepared to fight for it.
A president has to be educator in chief as well as commander in chief. But the White House lost control of the public option narrative very early on because, as Salon’s own Joan Walsh wrote on July 21, Obama hesitated from the start to lay down clear markers and defend them publicly. “I’m clear about why this is a tough fight for Obama. But I think he may be making it harder than it needs to be. I realize it’s difficult to define when still playing politics, necessarily, but I really want to know his bottom line,” Walsh pleaded, noting that on a range of disputed elements, including the public option, Obama was curiously vague and uncommitted about his intentions. That he has been only slightly more clear and committed in the ensuing month hasn’t helped.
First off, President Obama’s agenda is audacious but he isn’t. He’s the most risk-averse president in recent history.
More importantly, it’s becoming apparent that President Obama lacks Bill Clinton’s wonkishness. Conservatives said throughout the campaign that he lacked the experience to be competent. Now we’ve been proven right.
The other thing that’s happening is that conservatives are winning battles by being conservative:
Inside Washington, they were urged to reduce the influence of pro-lifers in the party and distance themselves from conservative talk radio hosts such as Rush Limbaugh. They were told to warm up to Mr. Obama, the new master of American politics, and they were told to fret about all those voting blocs that were drifting away from the GOP—Hispanics, young people, gays, urbanites, blacks, voters in Northeastern states and independents. To survive, in short, they needed to move the party to the center. Conservatism was dead.
In hindsight, it’s fortunate that they ignored the Beltway wisdom. But it was a gamble—it wasn’t clear at the time that a strategy of pure opposition would do anything other than marginalize Republicans.
Anything that’s considered conventional wisdom isn’t worthy of respect. Outside-the-box thinking is what changes minority parties into majority status. It also helps return the White House to its rightful place.
It took awhile but Republicans started taking the advice I gave the day after the 2006 disaster:
3. We need to pick some fights on the most important issues of the day.
The first fight I’d pick is on national security. I’m hearing that the Democrats are thinking of ways of gutting the Patriot Act. It’s important that President Bush knows that ‘We the Activists’ will fight with him if the Pelosi puppets attempt to gut the Patriot Act.
Simply put, it was important that we stopped walking on eggshells and started responding to the Democrats’ radical policies with confidence. Thanks to the leadership of House Republicans like Mike Pence, Paul Ryan, Thaddeus McCotter, John Boehner, Tom Price, Eric Cantor, Kevin McCarthy and John Kline, we’re on offense.
Gone from the House GOP Conference are the people who just went along. They’ve been replaced by people who believe in conservatism. More importantly, these new leaders know how to explain the main tenets of conservatism in plain-spoken language.
On health care, it’s nice that Republicans have offered several alternatives to Mr. Obama’s government-heavy plan. But these alternatives have played no role in turning America against the president’s ideas. Opposition to ObamaCare in all its parts (not only its cost) has been the chief factor in flipping public opinion.
And that opposition has validated the noisy protests at Democratic town-hall meetings. Absent Republican opposition in Washington, the protests could be dismissed as insignificant. Together, congressional Republicans and their grassroots allies have become an influential force.
Simply put, Paul Ryan and Mike Pence have more credibility on health care than does President Obama, Speaker Pelosi and congressional Democrats. That’s before we factor in people like Dr. Phil Gingrey, Dr. Tom Price, Dr. Charles Boustany, Dr. John Fleming and Dr. Tom Coburn. These gentlemen can talk from firsthand experience about what it’s like to fight with the Medicare bureaucracy to get procedures approved.
Because they’re able to talk from experience, those that hear the ‘doctor’s caucus’ message determine that they’re credible and worth listening to. Best of all, these gentlemen know what’s in H.R. 3200. They’ve pointed out with specificity and authority H.R. 3200’s shortcomings.
That, more than anything else, is what sunk Obamacare. It didn’t help that Henry Waxman wrote a bill that’s considerably to the left of the American people. The Democrats viewed this as the perfect opportunity to ram through highly ideological legislation.
On that, they guessed wrong.
Technorati Tags: Reform, President Obama, Speaker Pelosi, Henry Waxman, Health Care, Democrats, John Boehner, Eric Cantor, Paul Ryan, Mike Pence, Thad McCotter, Tom Price, John Kline, Kevin McCarthy, Conservatism, Loyal Opposition, Gravitas
Cross-posted at LetFreedomRingBlog
August 26th, 2009 at 1:14 pm
One thing that is common to all liberals and leftists is that they can’t be bothered by facts when the facts don’t fit their world view. This is a case in point.
What they can’t figure out is why, since they have enough minute information to run every aspect of everyone else’ lives, everyone else can’t see how graciously and benevolently benign in their intelligence they are and only want the best for everyone the way they see it?
Ah, the arrogance of senseless intelligence.