Ann Althouse pretty neatly summed up my macro reaction to the Massachusetts election:
Poor Obama! It’s the eve of the anniversary of his inauguration. The State of the Union was supposed to be very grand. And now what? He has been repudiated! He made this election a referendum on the Democrats agenda, and the people of Massachusetts, the most liberal state, gave him a resounding no.
Now, I think that could be good for Obama. He’s a man of change. Let him change. I hope he becomes the President I thought he could be when I voted for him. With the midterm elections looming in the fall, he can readjust, set himself apart from Congress. Take the people seriously.
I’ve got to believe that healthcare is headed for the wheels of the bus, because both Obama and the Democratic elites are passionate, primarily, about one thing – being re-elected. And the optics of their taking a stand on top of the monstrous pile of paper that this bill has metastized into in the face of such public opposition…and in the face of the weak coattails that Obama has shown to date…would be devastating both in 2010 and 2012.
I supported Obama for three reasons:
I felt that our conflict with radical Islam needed a reboot, a breather, in the face of the temptation to escalate our way out of things;
I felt that his campaign demonstrated immense competence at the mechanics of politics, and that that competence would neatly transfer to governing;
I felt that he meant it when he said he was about a different kind of politics than we’ve seen for the last decade or two – a more constructive, more inclusive politics that was about problem-solving and not about rewarding red-meat interest groups.
It’s clear that I was massively naive on 3); but he needs to decide – this week, really – whether he wants to keep marching down that path or whether he wants to pivot and try something different. The Blue Dogs and the Netroots are arguing over a two-dimensional map – conservative/moderate Democrats vs. liberal/progressive ones. I’ll suggest a third dimension – is he for the current malignant centers of political power (both liberal and conservative) who are sucking the life from the polity in America and killing our politics – or is he for something different?
He’s confronted with the horns of a brutal dilemma; and if he chooses one, he’ll inevitably be gored by the other. So the answer is to choose neither.
We’ll see this week what he does, and where his instincts take him, and we’ll know – very soon – if those of use like Ann and myself were mistaken in putting our trust in him. I think not. I hope not.
–
Maybe it’s just me, but I think people are losing interest in the personal journey of Barack Obama.
I still pin hopes to him, however. I’m hoping that Barack Obama will finally be the refutation of the unrepublican and anti-democratic myth of the Beautiful Liberal Savior-Politician. The ersatz movie star, of doubtful skill and absolutely zero provenance, without which our lives and our nation would be utterly meaningless and empty.
I’m counting on him to demolish that notion once and for all, the way Napoleon III wrecked France’s reputation for military prowess.
Others might have waning hopes, but mine shall soar.
It might be useful for him to learn what leadership actually is. Anyone can preside over a supermajority, let it have its way, and claim ownership and leadership over the results.
It’s a lot harder to actually lead by working with people whose ideas actually differ. Bill Clinton managed this, despite doing fairly stupid things in his first two years.
It is not impossible for Obama to learn the same lesson.
I am grinning and drinking a large shot of my best Scotch. If Massachusetts can do it, maybe there’s still hope for California. We shall see.
My impression of Obama was quite different than yours and so far I haven’t been the least disillusioned. But will he change? I don’t know. I agree that some congressional folks are deeply interested in their political future and will adapt. Oddly enough, I think there are a bunch of others who actually believe the crap they have been spouting for the last eight years, they will have a harder time adapting. But Obama? I still find his motivations opaque, I’m not even sure he cares about being reelected.
Obama has a golden opportunity to shoot this dog of a bill and completely remake himself with its successor. Its an opportunity that doesn’t come often. If he comes out next week and admits his mistakes, admits he got away from his princicples of compromise and open government, admits essentially that allowing congress to write the bills was a foreseeable disaster- he can restart the process all for the better for understanding the reality of the terrain.
Obama can still craft a bill that does some major reforms and if he is smart he can get enough republican support to pass it without congress getting their mark-up pens on it (too much anyway).
But I don’t think that will happen and here is why: Obama is a legislator at heart, not an executive. He believes the sausage making IS the process, and he doesn’t have the instincts or the guts to take on Reid and Pelosi… even though that is _exactly_ what the country wants him to do (and what he promised if you convert his words into actual deeds). He doesn’t have the patience or the strength of character to sit down with his guys and bang out a bill that enough republicans will support to offset the Thelma and Louise liberals he will lose. Write that bill and then bash _both_ parties over the head with the ‘do-nothing’ club reserved for republicans here-to-for. It would be very effective. But i don’t see it with Obama. Instead he will likely try to split the difference and end up squabbling with both sides and becoming irrelevant cut by cut.
Obama stayed away from the drafting of these bills because he didn’t want to be personally damaged if they crashed and burned, like Clinton-care did. He wanted to be the moral conscience and inspiration for health care, not responsible for any side effects, outrageous provisions, or damage to the economy. This is rather the opposite of courage and leadership, but never mind that.
Is anybody starting to get it? This is the second time a Democratic president and Democratic congress, backed by the full weight of the blithering classes and dispensing millions in bribes, have totally failed at “health care”.
Does it occur to anyone that “health care” would not work even on an all-Democrat planet, because you can’t reconcile liberals and the left? Liberals want pork, entitlements, and legislative monuments with their names on them. The left wants a socialism that they don’t even have the guts to call by name. What is indispensable to one is unacceptable to the other, and vice versa, and you cannot square this circle. It’s impossible. Capable people could not do it, if there were any capable people anywhere in sight.
And still Republicans and Democrats come back this: Napoleon would still like to see some kind of invasion of Russia. For the American people, and the children.
_”Napoleon would still like to see some kind of invasion of Russia.”_
I like that Glen! And of course i’m appropriating it at first opportunity.
Glen:_Does it occur to anyone that “health care” would not work even on an all-Democrat planet, because you can’t reconcile liberals and the left?_
My understanding is that most of the nations in Europe (and Japan and Korea) all have better health care than we do. And they’re all on this planet, not just some ‘magical’ planet.
I do agree though, the left has totally bought out (as has the right) which prevents us from fixing anything.
They’re from the part of the planet where permanent 10% unemployment is above average, in spite of a labor shortage. Economic growth does not exist, and the political class is immune from any consequences for massive taxation. Their great historical ambition is to die before the immigrant workers start using them for food.
This is where the Obama administration wanted to be by last August.
There is plenty we can learn from Europe (especially- don’t be so fat and unhealthy and you will be healthier and pay less for your healthcare), but it is extremely foolish to look at a skydiver with a chute and envy his ride. Its not the socialized healthcare that kills you, its the short sudden halt when you run out of other people’s money to spend.
We’ve got a huge spending death spiral of our own. If we pass anything like what’s (DOA thankfully) on the table now, it seems entirely unlikely we’d ever get our heads back above water. The odds are still long, but at least we’ve stopped shoveling for the moment.
Try living in a place that offers government-run health care (even one of the better systems like ours) and you will quickly realise that we aren’t necessarily better off than you are.
My father works at both public and private hospitals. The public hospitals are chronically under-staffed and lacking in money to buy even basic items, let alone advanced equipment that they need. Then there are the waiting times…
I don’t think the private hospitals have such problems. Thank god we still have private hospitals, although of course you can’t opt out of paying for the public ones, even if they are disaster zones.
I don’t think you can rely on third party testimony to make such an important decision.
bq. I’ve got to believe that healthcare is headed for the wheels of the bus, because both Obama and the Democratic elites are passionate, primarily, about one thing – being re-elected.
Whoa! If that’s true, then why should I (as a skeptic) believe one word of the Democratic rhetoric feed on health care?
I mean, if it is as important as they claim – and the bill is as good as they claim – and the Republicans are as evil as they claim for obstructing it – then they need to _ram it through_, not cave in order to run another day.
I mean, right? Because if they abandon it in order to preserve some kind of electoral viability, what they’re saying is that their own political survival is more important than extending coverage, containing costs, etc. In other words, sucks when Republicans kill the bill for politics, rocks when we do.
I have to say – if Obama and the House and Senate prove you wrong, double down and manage to pass something at dire perceived political cost, then I’ll have to grant them sincerity and integrity in their beliefs. It may be a disaster, or those of us who believe it will be a disaster may in time be proven wrong – but at least the Democratic political leaders will have acted with demonstrable conviction.
But if health care reform does become intimate with the bus wheels as you predict – then I have to conclude that perhaps the sky wasn’t falling after all.
Personally I don’t believe the sky was falling; neither was it sunny and blue, and some kind of _insurance reform_ was in the cards (and arguably overdue).
And if Obama becomes the President that Althouse thought she was voting for, by “choosing neither” in your words (wasn’t the Clinton era term for that… _triangulation?_) and forging some kind of _actual_ bipartisan consensus, I’ll be happy. Not as happy as you and Ann, but I’ll be happy.
But not happy enough to forget entirely disconnect between rhetoric and action, particularly the rhetoric that demonized anyone opposed to the process.
Half of America feels “othered” in their own country and won’t soon forget it.
This is what i think happens next- instead of the president putting together a bill that a genuine number of republicans will support (as per the way entitlements in the past were created), Obama is going to throw the ball back to Reid and Pelosi to try to peel off one more Republican senator to get this thing through, and then take it to a real conference committee where they hammer out ‘the real bill’ and dare anybody in the caucus to kill it. All this requires is buying off an Olympia Snow etc so well that she can’t back off from the final product.
If that doesn’t work (possibly some Dems Senators jump ship), they will scale something down that could get passed, and if not they will jam whatever they can get away with through with 51 votes.
lewy14:
If a cat traps itself in a laundry chute, and cannot crawl back out of the hatch it crawled into, then it has no choice but to make the vertical plunge to the basement and hope for the best. I’ll grant them that kind of sincerity and integrity right now.
This is the actual strategy some of them are discussing. When, like Richard III, you’re “in so far in blood that sin will pluck on sin”, you might as well charge straight ahead.
It helps when you’re led by a cat like Pelosi, who is oblivious to events, and maybe oblivious to any kind of external stimuli whatsoever.
_But if health care reform does become intimate with the bus wheels as you predict – then I have to conclude that perhaps the sky wasn’t falling after all._
Consider this: Health care expenses are expected to rise 10% in “2010”:http://www.boston.com/business/healthcare/articles/2009/09/16/health_insurers_plan_10_rise_in_rates/
Family Health premiums currently cost $13,375.
Now consider this, if a 10% increase continues for the next 5 years, by 2015 rates will be at 21,540. By 2,020 costs could be as high as 34,961 dollars per family.
This pretty closes matches senate and GAO office numbers published elsewhere (“here”:http://dpc.senate.gov/docs/sr-111-1-82.html for example).
If this comes to pass, any system that controls costs is going to look better than ours.
_”If this comes to pass, any system that controls costs is going to look better than ours.”_
First- that is a article you link to is about MASSACHUSETTS (you know, the state that already has a universal plan). It would appear that giving everyone health care doesnt make it cheaper (if we needed a laboratory to prove that).
Second- obviously there are any number of systems worse than a 10% increase in price. Such as the one on the table now.
Third- The one on the table now doesn’t seem to lower prices either, and will surely raise premiums. I still haven’t heard how forcing insurance companies to accept sick customers while slapping the uninsured with a fine many times less than insurance costs isn’t a recipe for huge cost increases when healthy people rationally decide to wait until they get sick to buy insurance.
Fourth- the only meaty cost lowering provision in the senate bill was the Cadillac tax which was gutted by the unions.
Finally- the argument that anything is better than our current system just doesn’t fly with the American people. We’ve seen too much of government to know it can indeed get MUCH worse, especially for the middle class. We’ve seen enough of this political class to know the people who will benefit from their plans will be special interests, not the middle class.
alchemist, you make good points. Our current system is unsustainable. I don’t necessarily believe that adopting one of the other systems out there will control costs. All of the OECD countries have unsustainable growth rates, though France seems to have an advantage. Their health care professionals work for something like a third of their American counterparts. I don’t see mandating compensation cuts by a third as anything less than a public health disaster.
Difficult problem, not facilitated by concentrating on insurance reform, when it’s healthcare improvements that are needed.
I’ve posed this question elsewhere, and would like as much feedback as reasonable:
What, in practice, stops hospitals from competing for emergency care customers, and thus driving health care costs down through competition? What stands in the way of clinics doing the same for clinical care?
(I received a pretty good answer for this, btw, in the form of a hospital in Tennessee that had signed a no-compete agreement. It struck me that it should never have been; it should have been found in violation of anti-trust law. But this was just in this one case.)
Is there a genuine logistical reason why two buildings with sufficient equipment and personnel located within ambulance range of, say, 500,000 people, cannot both be solvent?