“People just don’t want this bill. I think the big mistake was skipping the step of winning public support for a particular plan. It wasn’t enough that people believed there was a problem. People needed to believe the solution wasn’t worse than the problem. We were supposed to look away and trust them. The trust was never won, never earned. It’s been a horrific mess, and it just looks messier and messier as time wears on. Obama kept his distance, which looks pretty smart now.”Two thoughts on this....
1) The main problem that has doomed Obamacare is that the American people have a general historic distrust of what comes out of Congress. If the people had a positive, or even neutral, opinion of our Congresscritters, then Obama may well have been able to sign a healthcare reform bill by now. But the fact that the effort was so closely associated with Congress and not the highly popular new president probably spelled its doom. Since 'Obama kept his distance', and every pronouncement came out of preening camera-hogs in the Capital rotunda, its was obvious who was making the sausage. The One should have expended his own newly bestowed political capital to push the bill over the goal line, but he left it to those people that all polls show that America distrusts.
2) At the same time, keeping his distance did not work for Obama. The simple fact that the term 'Obamacare' is synonymous with the effort to cede the government control of everyone's healthcare, shows that his attempts to remain above the fray failed. While he did avoid being seen as working the details in the trenches, it was clear from the White House that healthcare reform was considered one of Obama's 'legacy issues'. Thus it is clear to most American's that while Congress is making the sausage, it was the White House that is running the Red Hot cart on the corner, selling the product to the public at large....
I think Ann is wrong. Obama does not escape the mess, and he does not look very smart...
12 comments:
"Obama does not escape the mess, and he does not look very smart..."
Agreed.
"Ann Althouse is wrong".
I generally agree with that statement as well!
Ah, greed.
Healthcare "reform" -- as proposed by the various bills in Congress -- creates dozens of new federal bureaucracies staffed with tens of thousands of new bureaucrats and commissioners empowered to create and enforce a vast array of new rules, regulations, controls and requirements dictating who must be insured and what such insurance must cover and who receives what care and when and by whom and at what price -- and Obama expected the American people to believe that this enormous expansion of government power was going to reduce healthcare costs while simultaneously expanding coverage for everyone AND be deficit neutral?
The American people are not as stupid as Obama thinks -- in fact, they are not as stupid as Obama evidently is.
"At the same time, keeping his distance did not work for Obama."
No, it clearly didn't. Even though he kept a far greater distance than the Clintons did in their run at Hillarycare he still ended up getting the blame. Maybe someday politicians will catch on that the public option that people really want is the option of letting markets work by keeping the State out off our business. And no, that has not been tried for many decades.
Cut Althouse some slack.
She only voted for Obama because of the color of his skin.
She's a professor - acadamia is accustomed to making allowances for affirmative action admits.
Althouse is a windbag who occasionally, accidentally gets something right, like Aunt Agatha on "Bewitched."
The problem with this bill is not really because Obama is too close or too far from it, the problem is the bill itself. The American people are not stupid, although we can be misinformed.
The American people look at what we can see of this constantly changing bill and we can see that it is not about health care but about control. The American people do not wish to be controlled. We are a nation of immigrants who left their homelands to come here to avoid being controlled.
I think what really sparked the opposition was the way Obama and Congress tried to jam the bill through before the public knew what was happening. Why would they do that if the public would like it? Very, very fishy, even to a naive person. And facts revealed about the bill and machinations promoting it since then have shown that instinctive suspicion to be right on the mark.
The violation of trust caused by this fiasco is going to stick to Congress AND Obama for a long time.
These guys are too clever by half. Obama doesn't want to risk association with failure so he doesn't put forward his own bill. Yet when the bills fail, he won't be able to crawfish away from them fast enough.
He is beginning to look like Chicago's answer to Wile E. Coyote, Super Genius.
This is Obama's bill but he's letting someone else write it. That's a rarefied degree of stupid and it's hard to see how Althouse misses that fact.
I'm more of an Althouse fan than some here, apparently, but there is a part of her brain that wants to be lied to (the part that voted for Obama) and that part of her brain was busily lying to her when she made this post.
This is really a fascinating blog, lots of stuff that I can Get into.
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