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Steve Hayward sticks his neck out and predicts the healthcare law will be repealed.
Prediction: even if HealthCare.gov is fixed by the end of the month (unlikely), Obamacare is going to be repealed well in advance of next year’s election. And if the website continues to fail, the push for repeal—from endangered Democrats—will occur very rapidly. The website is a sideshow: the real action is the number of people and businesses who are losing their health plans or having to pay a lot more. Fixing the website will only delay the inevitable.
It is important to remember why it was so important for Obama to promise repeatedly that “if you like your health insurance/doctor, you can keep your health insurance/doctor.” Cast your mind back to the ignominious collapse of Hillarycare in 1994. Hillarycare came out of the box in September 1993 to high public support according to the early polls. This was not a surprise. Opinion polls for decades have shown a large majority of Americans support the general idea of universal health coverage. But Hillarycare came apart as the bureaucratic details came out, the most important one being that you couldn’t be sure you’d be able to keep your doctors or select specialists of your choice. The Clintons refused to consider a compromise, but even with large Democratic Senate and House majorities the bill was so dead it was never brought up for a vote
Remember “Harry and Louise”? Obama did, which is why he portrayed Obamacare as simply expanding coverage to the uninsured, and improving coverage for the underinsured while leaving the already insured undisturbed. But the redistributive arithmetic of Obamacare’s architecture could never add up, which is what the bureaucrats knew early on—as early as 2010 according to many documents that have leaked. The wonder is that Obama’s political team didn’t see this coming and prepare a pre-emptive strategy for dealing with the inevitable exposure of the duplicity at the heart of Obamacare’s logic. Now that people are losing their insurance and finding that they may not be able to keep their doctor after all, Obamacare has become the domestic policy equivalent of the Iraq War: a protracted fiasco that is proving fatal to a president’s credibility and approval rating. …
Perhaps Hayward is right when even WaPo’s Chris Cilliazza can no longer ignore the disaster.
Who cares?
That’s a common reaction — particularly in the Democratic wing of the Twitter-sphere — anytime, like this morning, we post a piece detailing President Obama’s sinking poll numbers. The thinking goes something like this: President Obama isn’t ever going to have to run for re-election again so focusing on his poll numbers — whether good or bad — is a meaningless exercise by political journalists.
Except that it’s not. At all.
Take a look back at the election results from the second midterm elections of presidents, which is what 2014 will be. From the end of World War II up until the 1986 election, the president’s party lost an average of 48 seats in the House and seven seats in the Senate, according to the indispensable Congressional analyst Norm Ornstein. That “six year itch” trend has slowed in more recent second term midterm elections — the average losses for the president’s party in the 1986, 1998 and 2006 midterms is 10 seats in the House and 4 seats in the Senate — but the pattern of losses remain. (In only two six year itch elections since the Civil War — one of which happened in 1998 — has the president’s party not lost seats in Congress.)
There are a panoply of theories to explain the historical consistency of the six year itch. Here’s Fix mentor and non-partisan political handicapper Charlie Cook’s explanation: …
Jennifer Rubin lists 10 reasons for the administration to panic.
Sometimes a White House becomes obsessed with small dips in the polls and paranoid about transitory stories harmful to the president. This is not one of those times. It is time to call in a savior chief of staff in the mold of Howard Baker or look at some serious policy changes. Consider:
1. Instead of laudatory coverage, the administration is being slammed over its Iran negotiations, shedding doubt about the credibility of the president and his secretary of state. Like President Richard Nixon declaring “I am not a crook,” John Kerry was compelled to insist “We are not blind, and I don’t think we’re stupid.”
2. The administration has a knack for making bad situations awful. It misrepresented the president’s promise we could keep our insurance plans and doctors for days, until media pummeling made him give it up with a half-hearted apology. Now Kerry is spinning an unbelievable tale of the Geneva negotiations, making the Iranians’ account — which tracked all Western media accounts – seem the more honest of the two. (Iran negotiator Javad Zarif tweeted, ” Mr.Secretary, was it Iran that gutted over half of US draft Thursday night? and publicly commented against it Friday morning?”) …
And Bill Clinton has left the reservation. The Hill has the story.
President Obama scrambled to find a coherent response Tuesday after former President Clinton jammed the administration by saying it should keep its promise that people could keep their health insurance plans if they liked them.
The White House said Obama agreed with Clinton, but it offered no concrete idea on how that could be done.
Anxiety is growing among congressional Democrats, with the House poised to vote this week on Republican legislation to let insurers offer their old plans even if they don’t meet the new standards required by ObamaCare.
Whatever Bill Clinton’s motives — Republicans say he is distancing his wife, Hillary Clinton, from the ObamaCare debacle in advance of a White House run — his comments sharply intensified pressure on the president to change his signature law.
The White House opposes the pending House Republican bill but has no alternative yet. The quicker Obama comes up with an answer the better, House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) said Tuesday. …
More on Bill Clinton’s move from Jonathan Tobin.
The five-year-long dance between the Clintons and President Obama has always been an interesting show, but never more so than now as the runner-up in the 2008 Democratic presidential contest starts to maneuver in preparation for 2016. Hillary Clinton spent her four years as secretary of state playing the good soldier for the president, doing little of value but also (and unlike her spectacularly inept successor John Kerry) causing him little trouble. She exited the cabinet with a presidential love fest that had to annoy Vice President Joe Biden, her only likely rival for 2016. But now that she is safely out of the Washington maelstrom and embarked on a path that she hopes will see her return to the White House as president rather than first lady, her relationship with Obama has undergone a not-so-subtle change. That has allowed some of the old antagonism between her and, in particular, her husband and the man who beat her in 2008 to resurface.
That antagonism was on display today as Bill Clinton joined the growing chorus of critics of the ObamaCare rollout in an interview published in a web magazine. Speaking much as if he was one of the angry red-state Democrats who think the president’s lies about ObamaCare can sink their hopes of reelection next year, the 42nd president stuck a knife into the 44thpresident by saying the law should be changed to accommodate the demands of those who are losing their coverage despite the president’s promises to the contrary: …
And David Harsanyi asks what is wrong with rooting for failure?
… There are other reasons to cheer failure, as well. As Ed Rogers at The Washington Post recently wrote, “the failure of Obamacare would discourage and hopefully deter those who think a bigger, more domineering U.S. government is the answer to our problems. And most important, the horrors of this debacle and the collapse of Obamacare would have a chilling effect on politicians who want to promote big government solutions.”
My hope is that Obamacare — not to mention numerous other initiatives supported by the president — fails for a whole host of reasons. And not only do I have my fingers crossed that Obamacare fails in the way that most policy fails us but I hope it fails so hard that any residual perception among voters that any part of it was prudent policy is completely eliminated. Anything less might mean that a substantial enough bloc of Americans would continue to operate under the false impression that top-down technocratic control of their decisions is a good idea. And that would be a genuine failure.
Wishful thinking, no doubt. And admittedly, there’s also a self-centered reason to root for your ideological opponents not to succeed. Their misfortune confirms your worldview — one that you’ve probably spent considerable time and effort cultivating. Anyone with a shred of intellectual honesty remains somewhat open to the possibility that he is wrong, but he is certainly under no obligation to root against his own beliefs. Not even if a president armed with a straw man demands it of him.