This is big, what’s happening. President Obama appears to have misstepped on a major initiative and defining issue. He has misjudged the nation’s mood, which itself is news: He rose from nothing to everything with the help of his fine-tuned antennae. Resistance to the Democratic health-care plans is in the air, showing up more now on YouTube than in the polls, but it will be in the polls soon enough. The president, in short, may be facing a real loss. This will be interesting in a number of ways and for a number of reasons, among them that we’ve never seen him publicly defeated before, because he hasn’t been. So we may be entering new territory, with new struggles shaped by new dynamics.Read the rest of it here. She gives several other reasons why the health care bill may fail.
His news conference the other night was bad. He was filibustery and spinny and gave long and largely unfollowable answers that seemed aimed at limiting the number of questions asked and running out the clock. You don’t do that when you’re fully confident. Far more seriously, he didn’t seem to be telling the truth. We need to create a new national health-care program in order to cut down on government spending? Who would believe that? Would anybody?
The common wisdom the past week has been that whatever challenges health care faces, the president will at least get something because he has a Democratic House and Senate and they’re not going to let their guy die. He’ll get this or that, maybe not a new nationalized system but some things, and he’ll be able to declare some degree of victory.
And this makes sense. But after the news conference, I found myself wondering if he’d get anything.
I think the plan is being slowed and may well be stopped not by ideology, or even by philosophy in a strict sense, but by simple American common sense. I suspect voters, the past few weeks, have been giving themselves an internal Q-and-A that goes something like this:
Will whatever health care bill is produced by Congress increase the deficit? “Of course.” Will it mean tax increases? “Of course.” Will it mean new fees or fines? “Probably.” Can I afford it right now? “No, I’m already getting clobbered.” Will it make the marketplace freer and better? “Probably not.” Is our health care system in crisis? “Yeah, it has been for years.” Is it the most pressing crisis right now? “No, the economy is.” Will a health-care bill improve the economy? “I doubt it.”
The White House misread the national mood. The problem isn’t that they didn’t “bend the curve,” or didn’t sell it right. The problem is that the national mood has changed since the president was elected. Back then the mood was “change is for the good.” But that altered as the full implications of the financial crash seeped in. The crash gave everyone a diminished sense of their own margin for error. It gave them a diminished sense of their country’s margin for error. Americans are not in a chance-taking mood. They’re not in a spending mood, not after the unprecedented spending of the past year, from the end of the Bush era through the first six months of Obama. Here the Congressional Budget Office report that a health care bill would not save money but would instead cost more than a trillion dollars in the next decade was decisive. People say bureaucrats never do anything. The bureaucrats of CBO might have killed health care.
The final bill, with all its complexities, will probably be huge, a thousand pages or so. Americans don’t fear the devil’s in the details, they fear hell is. Do they want the same people running health care who gave us the Department of Motor Vehicles, the post office and the invasion of Iraq?
Saturday, July 25, 2009
The American Mood Has Changed
Peggy Noonan, who has been an unabashed supporter of Obama as should bought into all the hopey changey stuff, now thinks Obama is about to suffer a major loss on health care:
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2 comments:
"He rose from nothing to everything with the help of his fine-tuned antennae." I find it hard to believe that someone of Ms. Noonan's experience could write such a sentence, but there it is.
Oh, how have the mighty fallen. Whatever happened to "follow the money"? Our president most assuredly did not "rise out of nothing." He has had backers all along the way. Who are they? What were their motivations? How did he finance his first campaign? How did he purchase his fine house? Whose influence got Michelle that cushy $300k "hospital" gig (wasn't that a great boon for patient care).
Obama rose from well ignored smoke and mirrors erected by people who do not want their connections revealed. Formerly a friendly but adversarial press would have sniffed these people out. Now the "media" are Obama's chorus.
He doesn't have "antennae" -- it's people like Ms. Noonan who have lost "antennae," who are more than content to stick their heads in the sand. The question Peggy Noonan asks should be directed to her bathroom mirror. She should be asking herself, how was I -- who worked inside the White House of the greatest American president of modern times -- how was I totally hoodwinked by this pretender who says one thing one day and two weeks later says so smoothly the exact opposite?
Something in the water, Peggy? Or just dopey, self-aggrandizing pride?
But the question needs to be self-directed and self-corrected.
I would hope that "Obamacare" will bring down Obama. Hopefully it will put an end to his career in ruining life for freedom loving Americans.
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