Excuses, Excuses The Dog Ate Obama’s Health-Care Reform: James Taranto
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303281504579222202405206972
When we got up this morning, there was an email on our BlackBerry from “Barack Obama.” We assumed that, like all the other emails we get from “Obama,” it was a fundraising pitch from Organizing for Action, the 501(c)(4) “social welfare” organization that sells access to the president. We began reading:
Dear the American People,
Things are tough for me at the moment; as you may know, the website for my health care plan had a big glitch.
If I were my predecessor, I’d order a full-scale attack on Webistan. Fortunately Webistan doesn’t exist, so I’ve just had to deal.
Dealing is hard. But I know in my heart that despite this glitch, and even if there are additional glitches, we will one day in this country have a health care system even better than Cuba’s.
How do I stay optimistic? Simple: as a one-time community organizer, I know that even when actions don’t achieve miracles right out the door, the overall movement does often succeed. Even glitches can play a part in the triumph.
It was a fundraising pitch–not from OFA but from The Yes Men, an Alinskyite group of merry pranksters (or, in their self-description, a “raggedy group of anti-corporate weirdos”). The note from “Obama” was a satire from the left–and it was pitch-perfect up until the Cuba reference, which descended into self-parody. The Yes Men no doubt believe Cuba’s health-care system is better than America’s. Maybe the OFA guys do too, but if so, they’re savvy enough to keep it to themselves.
If only he had the stomach to eat a 2,000-page law. Getty Images
Not everyone on the left has turned against Obama in such a hilarious fashion. But among those who are defending ObamaCare–which is to say, making excuses for failure–some are equally hilarious, if unwittingly so.
Over the weekend Joe Nocera of the New York Times weighed in on the question of which of history’s political disasters ObamaCare most resembles. His answer: the 1961 effort by a CIA-trained paramilitary to topple Cuba’s superior health-care system.
As Nocera tells it, authorizing the invasion was a rookie mistake by President Kennedy:
The American military and the C.I.A. assumed that once the attack began, the Cuban people would rise up and overthrow Fidel Castro.
Kennedy was privately skeptical, but he didn’t yet have the confidence in his own judgment to override the experts he was surrounded by. So he gave the go-ahead–only to discover that the experts didn’t know what they were talking about. The exiles were quickly routed, America was humiliated and Kennedy was left to take the blame.
So far, at least, the implementation of the Affordable Care Act has been President Obama’s Bay of Pigs. Led to believe that the preparation for Obamacare was on track, Obama was blindsided when that turned out not to be the case.
So we are supposed to believe that Obama was “privately skeptical” of ObamaCare but bullied it through anyway because he lacked “the confidence in his own judgment to override the experts he was surrounded by,” as a result of which he was “blindsided.” Not only is that implausible, but it makes Obama look even more pathetic than he is. An act of willful destruction at least commands a certain grudging respect.
Nocera concludes by invoking the Cuban Missile Crisis, another Kennedy-era encounter with the island of superior health care. Once again, Kennedy received bad judgment from the Pentagon, but this time he rejected it. “He had applied the lessons he had learned from the Bay of Pigs to the Cuban missile crisis. As President Obama tries to turn Obamacare around, that is the looming question: Can he learn?”
No.
HotAir.com notes that Time’s Mark Halperin, in an appearance on “The O’Reilly Factor” last week, blamed journalists: “There is no doubt that the press failed to scrutinize this program at the time of passage and during the context of the president’s re-election. Any reporter who would argue otherwise would be putting their head in the sand.”
There is considerable truth to this indictment. Here, for example, is what one journalist wrote on March 22, 2010, the day after the House passed ObamaCare:
In the 7½ months between now and November’s midterm elections, millions of Americans will be whipped into a frenzy over the purported evils in the Democrats’ health care bill, egged on by Fox News chatter, Rush Limbaugh’s daily sermons, threats of state legislative and judicial action and the solemn pledge of Republicans in Washington to make the fall election a referendum on Obamacare. But in doing so, they may be playing right into the Democrats’ hands. . . .
Democrats will be joined in the fray by much of the press. For Republicans, this will seem like familiar ground, since generations of conservatives have complained that the so-called mainstream media have been biased against them. Well, get ready, Republicans, for déjà vu all over again. The coverage through November likely will highlight the most extreme attacks on the President and his law and spotlight stories of real Americans whose lives have been improved by access to health care (pushed, no doubt, by Democrats from every competitive congressional district and state).
The louder Republicans yell, the more they will be characterized and caricatured as sore losers infuriated by the first major delivery of candidate Obama’s promise of “change.” The focus on the weekend’s alleged racial and gay-bashing verbal attacks by opponents of the Democrats’ plan should be a caution to Republican strategists trying to figure out how to manage the media this year.
The author of that passage: Time’s Mark Halperin. His indictment should have been framed as a confession.
CNN’s John Blake is blasé in the face of the most massive consumer fraud in American history. “Of Course Presidents Lie” is the title of his essay, which appeals to the authority of Machiavelli in making the case that “lying is the verbal lubricant that keeps the Oval Office engine running.”
He argues for a distinction between “forgivable lies,” which are “meant to keep the nation from harm,” and “unforgivable lies,” which are “meant to cover up crimes, incompetence or protect [sic] a president’s political future.” The examples are priceless:
That distinction is why Bill Clinton remains popular, and George W. Bush remains reviled for his “lie,” says Allan Cooper, a political scientist and historian at Otterbein University in Ohio.
In a nationally televised address in 2003, Bush said that invading Iraq was necessary “to eliminate weapons of mass destruction.”
“Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised,” Bush said.
Clinton told the nation that he did “not have sexual relations with that woman.”
“Clinton’s lies about a sexual affair were understandable given his interest to protect his marriage and to shield the nation’s children from having to ask their parents to explain the phenomenon of oral sex,” Cooper says. “Bush’s lies led to the death and injuries of thousands of Americans.”
Even Blake, with those scare quotes around Bush’s “lie,” acknowledges it wasn’t a lie but a mistaken belief that was held in good faith at the time by just about everyone in the West, including domestic and international opponents of Bush’s call for military intervention.
Meanwhile, Clinton’s lie was in reality a perfect example of one “meant to cover up crimes . . . or protect a president’s political future.” Cooper’s description of it as motivated by decency and respect for Mrs. Clinton is delusional. (If one wished to draw a comparison favorable to Clinton and unfavorable to Bush, it would be that the former’s lie concerned a matter of far less public importance than the latter’s mistake.)
Blake asserts that “Obama’s statement”–the if-you-like-it-you-can-keep-it swindle–“will be judged by the same standard: Did it help the country, or did he say it just to save his bacon?” The Daily Caller has the answer:
A Wilson Perkins Allen Opinion Research survey conducted from Nov. 18-20 asked voters who supported President Barack Obama in 2012: “As you may know, millions of Americans have lost their insurance plans despite President Obama’s promise that, quote, ‘if you like your plan, you can keep it.’ If you knew in 2012 that this promise was not true, would you still have voted for Barack Obama?”
In response, 23 percent said they would not have voted to re-elect Obama, while 72 percent said they would still have voted for him. The largest number of defections were among female voters ages 18-54, 31 percent of whom said they would not have supported the president.
An ABC/Washington Post poll released earlier this week found that if they had a do-over, Romney would win 49 percent to 45 percent. The difference is within the margin of error of 3.5 percentage points, but Obama polls a lower percentage of the vote today than he did in November 2012.
The Washington Post’s Amy Goldstein and Juliet Eilperin report that even before the ObamaCare launch, administration officials were preparing to blame the contractor that designed the federal exchange:
At 9 a.m. on Aug. 22, a team of federal health officials sat down in a Baltimore conference room with at least a dozen employees of CGI Federal, the company with the main contract to build the online federal health insurance marketplace. For six weeks, the federal officials overseeing the project had become increasingly worried that CGI was missing deadlines, understaffing the work and overstating its progress.
As the meeting began, one of the officials reminded the CGI employees that HealthCare.gov was “the president’s number one priority,” assured them that the discussion would be a “blame-free zone,” and then bored in. “We must be honest and open with each other,” the official said, according to documents obtained from participants in the session. “I have to know what I don’t know.”
The top CGI executive in the room sounded contrite. “We recognize we have to build trust back . . .” said Cheryl Campbell, the company’s senior vice president in charge of the project.
A New York Times report by Eric Lipton, Ian Austen and Sharon LaFraniere describes the same meeting:
On a sultry day in late August, a dozen staff members of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services gathered at the agency’s Baltimore headquarters with managers from the major contractors building HealthCare.gov to review numerous problems with President’s Obama’s online health insurance initiative. The mood was grim.
The prime contractor, CGI Federal, had long before concluded that the administration was blindly enamored of an unrealistic goal: creating a cutting-edge website that would use the latest technologies to dazzle consumers with its many features. Knowing how long it would take to complete and test the software, the company’s officials and other vendors believed that it was impossible to open a fully functioning exchange on Oct. 1.
Government officials, on the other hand, insisted that Oct. 1 was not negotiable. And they were fed up with what they saw as CGI’s pattern of excuses for missed deadlines. Michelle Snyder, the agency’s chief operating officer, was telling colleagues outright, “If we could fire them, we would.”
It seems the administration and CGI are both determined to blame each other. No doubt there’s plenty of blame to go around, but who chose and managed the contractor? Reuters’ Sharon Begley answers that one:
Caught flat-footed by the challenges of building the financial-management and accounting parts of the U.S. government’s new online marketplace for health insurance, officials rushed to hire a familiar contractor without seeking competing bids, according to government procurement documents reviewed by Reuters
Of course the most popular excuse for ObamaCare’s failures is that they’re somehow Republicans’ fault. New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait notes that Obama also promised “if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor,” then observes that “not everybody is going to keep their doctor.”
Chait faults conservatives for faulting Obama for failing to keep this promise, which Chait imagines is consistent with “conservative orthodoxy”:
Conservatives don’t want to protect everybody’s right to keep their doctor. They want to build on the same market forces that are creating the Keep Your Doctor sob stories. Hatred for Obamacare is such an idée fixe on the right that it is impossible for conservatives to admit that the hated law is carrying out their idea, but that is exactly what is happening.
That overcomplicates matters a bit, doesn’t it? It seems to us perfectly normal that a politician’s opponents would call him to account for selling a bad policy on dishonest premises.
Robert Reich, the leftist former labor secretary, has a hysterical piece at the Puffington Host in which he asserts that Republicans “are hell-bent on destroying the Affordable Care Act in Americans’ minds”–something the Affordable Care Act (as ObamaCare is euphemistically known) seems to be doing quite well on its own. We got a kick out of this Reich passage:
We are becoming a vastly unequal society in which most of the economic gains are going to the top. It’s only just that those with higher incomes bear some responsibility for maintaining the health of Americans who are less fortunate.
This is a profoundly moral argument about who we are and what we owe each other as Americans. But Democrats have failed to make it, perhaps because they’re reluctant to admit that the Act involves any redistribution at all.
Redistribution has become so unfashionable it’s easier to say everyone comes out ahead. And everyone does come out ahead in the long term.
You’ve got to love that last bit. He hints that he’s going to be unfashionable, defend redistribution, and avoid the cop-out that “everyone comes out ahead”–and then he goes to that cop-out in the very next sentence!
Maybe Republicans do control his mind.
Finally a comment, noted by blogress Ann Althouse, from Fox News’s Juan Williams: “It’s what the White House now calls the original sin. They cannot work or expect Republicans to work with them to fix the plan.”
Come to think of it, that may be a more apt analogy than Althouse, or even Williams, realizes. The original original sin consisted in Eve and then Adam eating the forbidden fruit, as a result of which they acquired the knowledge of good and evil. And ObamaCare’s opponents have known all along that it was evil.
Other Than That, the U.N. Report Was Accurate
“The news spread like wildfire after the World Health Organization reported that about half of new H.I.V. cases in Greece were ‘self-inflicted’ as a way to get state benefit payments. Social media erupted on Monday. There were headlines everywhere from The Daily Mail to the Drudge Report to Al Jazeera. The conservative American commentator Rush Limbaugh weighed in, saying the story shows ‘what the welfare state does to people.’ But on Tuesday morning, the World Health Organization and the group that produced the report conceded that the H.I.V. claim was not true. ‘There is no evidence of people in Greece or anywhere else in Europe deliberately infecting themselves,’ said Martin Donoghoe, a spokesman for the health organization. So what happened? It was an editing error, the group said. It apologized.”–New York Times website, Nov. 26
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