It's the Credibility, Stupid

Thomas Sowell urges caution as we listen to Obama's health care address to congress on Wednesday:

The most important thing about what anyone says are not the words themselves but the credibility of the person who says them.

The words of convicted swindler Bernie Madoff were apparently quite convincing to many people who were regarded as knowledgeable and sophisticated. If you go by words, you can be led into anything.

No doubt millions of people will be listening to the words of President Barack Obama Wednesday night when he makes a televised address to a joint session of Congress on his medical care plans. But, if they think that the words he says are what matters, they can be led into something much worse than being swindled out of their money.

One plain fact should outweigh all the words of Barack Obama and all the impressive trappings of the setting in which he says them: He tried to rush Congress into passing a massive government takeover of the nation's medical care before the August recess— for a program that would not take effect until 2013!

Whatever President Obama is, he is not stupid. If the urgency to pass the medical care legislation was to deal with a problem immediately, then why postpone the date when the legislation goes into effect for years— more specifically, until the year after the next Presidential election?

If this is such an urgently needed program, why wait for years to put it into effect? And if the public is going to benefit from this, why not let them experience those benefits before the next Presidential election?

If it is not urgent that the legislation goes into effect immediately, then why don't we have time to go through the normal process of holding Congressional hearings on the pros and cons, accompanied by public discussions of its innumerable provisions? What sense does it make to "hurry up and wait" on something that is literally a matter of life and death?

If we do not believe that the President is stupid, then what do we believe? The only reasonable alternative seems to be that he wanted to get this massive government takeover of medical care passed into law before the public understood what was in it.

Moreover, he wanted to get re-elected in 2012 before the public experienced what its actual consequences would be.

Unfortunately, this way of doing things is all too typical of the way this administration has acted on a wide range of issues.

There's more here.

The administration is already proclaiming that this will be a "powerful" speech "calling for action" on health care. No doubt it will be full of that old Obama magic - lots of words, great rhetorical flourishes, perhaps a victim of America's "terrible" health care system or two in the VIP gallery, and lot of Democrats leaping to their feet in rapturous joy (while Republicans sit on their hands). It will surely be a spectacle, designed to refocus the health care debate.

And it will fail.

The health care debate has been going hot and heavy for more than two months now. The people have had plenty of opportunity to make up their minds about "public options", "co-ops", "triggers", and all the other stuff that's part of the debate. The congressmen sitting in the House chamber will have just come back from being shouted at by angry voters. A presidential speech is not going to convince them to vote themselves out of office by supporting a plan that their constituents hate.

It will be a Shakespearean speech (from Macbeth):

...a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.