A week ago, I reminisced with a Democrat politician over dinner about a 30-year-old incident in Indiana politics.
A well-heeled and attractive Republican candidate for State Senate was challenging an entrenched and well-liked Democrat. The Republican was young, and a newcomer to politics. At least one of the Democrats’ overall state themes that year was that Republican governance, or the mismanagement thereof, had given us a big deficit. The Republicans replied that there was no deficit. The Republican candidate repeated the party line over and over. Then, a few weeks before the election, the Republicans were forced to admit there was a deficit, and a really big one. The Republican candidate lost the election, thought I’d be making up for a failed memory if I said “badly.” (I’m pleased to report that he moved on well, though not politically.)
The Republicans simply wouldn’t admit reality, lest it give aid and comfort to Democrats during an election. The either lied or deluded themselves.
President Obama has now followed their example:
On one side, members of the economic team and Obama health-care adviser Zeke Emanuel lobbied for the president to appoint an outside health reform “czar” with expertise in business, insurance and technology. On the other, the president’s top health aides — who had shepherded the legislation through its tortuous path on Capitol Hill and knew its every detail — argued that they could handle the job.
In the end, the economic team never had a chance: The president had already made up his mind, according to a White House official who spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to be candid. Obama wanted his health policy team — led by Nancy-Ann DeParle, director of the White House Office of Health Reform — to be in charge of the law’s arduous implementation. Since the day the bill became law, the official said, the president believed that “if you were to design a person in the lab to implement health care, it would be Nancy-Ann.”
Three and a half years later, such insularity — in that decision and others that would follow — has emerged as a central factor in the disastrous rollout of the new federal health insurance marketplace , casting doubt on the administration’s capacity to carry out such a complex undertaking.
…
Based on interviews with more than two dozen current and former administration officials and outsiders who worked alongside them, the project was hampered by the White House’s political sensitivity to Republican hatred of the law — sensitivity so intense that the president’s aides ordered that some work be slowed down or remain secret for fear of feeding the opposition.
There’s more to the Washington Post story, of course. The Republicans really did want to monkey-wrench implementation. But that emphasizes, does it not, the quip that they passed it without any Republican votes and could damn well try to implement it without Republican help, too.
Our imperious President may have lost this battle spectacularly, but assuming he preferred single-payer, he may yet win the war.
In hindsight, I coulda been a contenda in the Prophecy racket if I’d trash-talked Obamacare like a Tea Party stalwart. The “glitches” are worse than I imagined, and two paywalled pieces from the Wall Street Journal, which I can only snip here and there, drive it home.
Peggy Noonan:
I called ObamaCare, at the time of its passage, a catastrophic victory—one won at too great cost, with too much political bloodshed, and at the end what would you get? Barren terrain. A thing not worth fighting for.
So the program debuts and it’s a resounding, famous, fantastical flop …
But now it’s much more serious. No one’s thinking about the websites. They wish you were thinking about the websites! I bet America hopes the websites never work so they never have to enroll.
…
They said if you liked your insurance you could keep your insurance—but that’s not true. It was never true! They said if you liked your doctor you could keep your doctor—but that’s not true. It was never true! They said they would cover everyone who needed it, and instead people who had coverage are losing it—millions of them! They said they would make insurance less expensive—but it’s more expensive! Premium shock, deductible shock. They said don’t worry, your health information will be secure, but instead the whole setup looks like a hacker’s holiday. Bad guys are apparently already going for your private information.
Edie Littlefield Sundby:
My grievance is not political; all my energies are directed to enjoying life and staying alive, and I have no time for politics. For almost seven years I have fought and survived stage-4 gallbladder cancer, with a five-year survival rate of less than 2% after diagnosis. I am a determined fighter and extremely lucky. But this luck may have just run out: My affordable, lifesaving medical insurance policy has been canceled effective Dec. 31.
The most intransigent of Tea Partiers may yet prove to have been guilty of nothing worse than understatement.
John Presnall clearly read different obituaries than I did:
Much venom has been spent against the recently departed Lou Reed. He apparently was emblematic of all that was wrong in America. He was the poster boy of popular musical artists in terms of drug addiction and sexual deviance. And apparently it feels good to point out and condemn his deviance.
All I saw was adulation of genius and some over-the-top claims of his world-historical significance.
I’ll shut up now since my reaction was “Velvet Underground; that’s one I haven’t heard mentioned in a long time” and “so that’s who did ‘Walk on the Wild Side’.”
No, I will not play Trivial Pursuits with you for high stakes.
[A]ll you have to do to be reminded that there is some connection between individualism and statism is to utter the phrase “single mom.”
* * * * *
“The remarks made in this essay do not represent scholarly research. They are intended as topical stimulations for conversation among intelligent and informed people.” (Gerhart Niemeyer)
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 