Major Update: The Obama Administration and DC Congressional liberals are out on the Sunday morning news shows with a whopper of BS on health care costs – we have not scored savings from increased health!

This is so naive and lame it is laughable. How do you score increased health as a cost savings? Will they be reducing the need for health care across the population by solving nagging major medical conditions like cancer? What is this, some sci-fi fairy tale?

The only way to make the general populace healthier without major medical breakthroughs is to cull out the sickly. Is that their plan? [Update: Sebelius just hinted that Americans will be responsible for getting healthier, getting their kids off the couch, eating right. She just hinted at the ‘life style’ Nazis are coming.]

These people are way in over their heads. – end update.

President Obama’s signature policies on health care and energy taxes (supposedly to answer to mythical crisis that really don’t exist) are in deep trouble. They are in deep trouble because the liberals failed so miserably on the economy and creating jobs. So far their policies have seen over 2 million more jobs lost since February with more expected through out the next year before things could reverse.

This utter and complete failure has brought President Obama’s Hope & Change back down to reality where now we now it is not “Yes We Can” it’s “They Screwed Up Royally“. By naivelly going with the liberal congressional democrat leadership and their doomed-to-failure liberal economic experiments, President Obama is losing support for any more similar nonsense. And the news media is awash with the stories.

Let’s start with the AP and their continued confusion as to how one really stimulates job growth:

Could it be that President Barack Obama’s Midas touch is starting to dull a bit, even among members of his own party?

Conservative House Democrats are balking at the cost and direction of Obama’s top priority, an overhaul of the nation’s health care system. 

…

With the economy continuing to sputter and joblessness on the rise, many of Obama’s staunchest Democratic supporters are anxious for his agenda to start bearing fruit.

…

Obama won Ohio, a key swing state, by 4 percentage points in 2008 over Republican John McCain. But the one-time industrial powerhouse has been hit hard by the weak economy, and a Quinnipiac University poll released this month showed Obama with a lackluster approval rating of 49 percent.

…

A similar argument came from Nevada, another swing state Obama carried. Las Vegas City Councilman Steve Ross counseled patience, saying that voters in his state want Obama to succeed and that their support would be solidified once they saw stimulus-driven building projects under way.

“Generally, folks in Nevada are waiting to see the effects of the stimulus package,” Ross said. “I think the president is probably just as impatient to get this money out in the country to employ people as anyone.“

Emphasis mine. If he is then he is more naive and ignorant of the federal government than I thought possible. Obama never spent much time in DC or dealing with the federal government. He was an unimpressive junior senator from Illinois whose only talent seemed to be his silver tongue and making wild promises. If people are impatient to “get this money out in the country” then they should have used tax cuts – which act IMMEDIATELY.

Tax cuts result in the money never leaving the country, never being gobbled up by DC in the first place. Tax cuts mean every citizen making money gets to keep more of their own money and SPRND it. Not horde it and lock it away like the democrats’ ‘stimulus’ package which involves the bureaucracy following a myriad of archaic rules and laws to plan to spend the money for about year before they actually get down to some spending.

Tax cuts mean companies retain more of their earnings, so they can cover people in their jobs through the downturn (which they want to do given the cost of training and the fact good workers are hard to find). Tax cuts means stimulus. Pork government spending programs means failure, as we all now know painfully well.

So, what is a failing (or should that be flailing) President to do? Well it seems instead of admitting they went down the wrong path Obama and the DC liberal elite are targeting their own party members:

The Democratic National Committee’s Organizing for America Arm – criticized by Harry Reid yesterday for an ad pressuring Senate Democrats on health care — has launched a similar effort in the House.

A version of the same ad, in which citizens recount their families’ health care woes and declare that “it’s time” for reform, will be running in 15 media markets around the country.

The ad doesn’t say this, but a look at the media markets indicates that the White House political operation hasn’t backed off targeting Democrats — and indeed, has stepped up that program. 

Will this pressure work? Most likely not. In fact, the obvious (and apparently forming) result is a backlash. Once attacked by the far left fringe, the centrists are now free to chart their own course. There is no point in trying to salvage Obama-Reid-Pelosi if they cannot admit they are heading in the wrong direction and everyone on the planet knows it. So centrists will move to save the country and let the chips fall on their wayward party as they may:

Some centrist House Democrats have reached out to Republicans to explore breaking with their party leadership on healthcare and crafting a reform bill with the rival GOP, one congressman claimed Saturday.

Rep. Charles Boustany (R-La.) asserted that an “interesting development” is taking place underway that, if true, could effectively remove Democratic leadership from the driver’s seat on healthcare reform legislation in the House.

“There’s an interesting development occurring behind the scenes, wherein moderate Democrats — so-called “Blue Dog” Democrats — and business-friendly new Democrats are actually starting to have conversations with us to build a coalition from the center outward, to actually really come up with substantive and well-founded healthcare reform,” Boustany said during an appearance on Fox News. “And that’s the only way to do this.”

The GOP fell from power in 2006 and 2008 in a very similar manner as to how the liberal leaders could fall from power in 2010 and 2012. The far right transitioned from allies in a broad coalition that swept to left of center into purity police who denigrated anyone and everyone who looked towards the center for reasoned compromise. They still hold out delusions of returning to power, not understand they had their chance and will not get another with the current crop of ‘true conservatives’.

But that may be the last gasp of the right side fringe. If the GOP does build a center-out coalition they could dominate politics again for many years, just like Reagan did with his center out coalition of Reagan Democrats. As I noted here, there are major cracks forming on the democrats’ side and a centrist coalition of Senators from both sides of the aisle are forming to stop Obamacare.

Could this work? I think the country is more than ready to solve problems without the constant nagging about purity from both fringes. For example:

The president knows his keystone program is in deep trouble and losing momentum. That’s why his organization is sending out all those e-mails and organizing local discussion groups to mobilize grassroots support and why he drags the subject into everything he talks about. 

…

Which sounds much like winter’s successful argument for urgent passage of the economic stimulus bill, whose benefits have yet to appear. We gotta do this now doesn’t always work the second time around.

Obama insists Congress get a healthcare reform program drafted before its members leave on….

 

… Aug. 7 for their next long vacation. Why? Because members may get an earful back home from the 70% of Americans who say they are satisfied with their healthcare plans and the estimated 98% who don’t want higher taxes to pay for reforms that benefit others now and maybe them later someday, who knows.

The amazing thing is that we only need to make to August 7th to change the direction of this country, as the last article points out:

And if Obama doesn’t get his beloved healthcare reforms this year when his party has such firm control of both chambers of Congress, 2010 is a midterm election year when such immense spending will be even more controversial and when, historically, the White House party loses members in Congress. (And  unemployment rates are predicted to continue rising.)

It really does come down to the next few days. From what I am reading it may already be too late for Obamacare, given the broadsides coming from the media today. Take this ‘2nd coming of Carter’ tirade in the WaPo:

Barely six months into his presidency, Barack Obama seems to be driving south into that political speed trap known as Carter Country: a sad-sack landscape in which every major initiative meets not just with failure but with scorn from political allies and foes alike. According to a July 13 CBS News poll, the once-unassailable president’s approval rating now stands at 57 percent, down 11 points from April. Half of Americans think the recession will last an additional two years or more, 52 percent think Obama is trying to “accomplish too much,” and 57 percent think the country is on the “wrong track.”

From a lousy cap-and-trade bill awaiting death in the Senate to a health-care reform agenda already weak in the knees to the failure of the stimulus to deliver promised jobs and economic activity, what once looked like a hope-tastic juggernaut is showing all the horsepower of a Chevy Cobalt. “Give it to me!” the presidentegged on a Michigan audience last week, pledging to “solve problems” and not “gripe” about the economic hand he was dealt.

Despite such bravura, Obama must be furtively reviewing the history of recent Democratic administrations for some kind of road map out of his post-100-days ditch.

If President Obama doesn’t want to turn into the lamest of lame ducks, he needs to step back and figure out how to change direction. This is not changing hearts and minds time – that period is over. If he attacks allies they go over to the growing opposition. He has failed to do as he promised, and instead of admitting it he has tried to claim we were all too dumb to understand him when he was selling his stimulus disaster.

Here is President Obama’s speech on the matter back before it passed. It is a mixture of honesty and BS on the matter, now that we have 20-20 hindsight and President Obama has finally admitted the stimulus bill was never going to stimulate any new job growth for months and years. Going back over his flashy words from then, we can understand why he has lost credibility now:

Just in the past year, another 2.8 million Americans who want and need full-time work have had to settle for part-time jobs.  Manufacturing has hit a twenty-eight year low.  Many businesses cannot borrow or make payroll.  Many families cannot pay their bills or their mortgage.  Many workers are watching their life savings disappear. 

…

I don’t believe it’s too late to change course, but it will be if we don’t take dramatic action as soon as possible.  If nothing is done, this recession could linger for years.  The unemployment rate could reach double digits.  Our economy could fall $1 trillion short of its full capacity, which translates into more than $12,000 in lost income for a family of four. 

This was what he promised to avoid. He failed. We will reach double digit unemployment (16 states already have). We will have piled up a record shattering $1.84 trillion dollars of debt by the end of September (that’s $6,133 per man, woman and child ON TOP OF the taxes they paid this year). Here is what Obama promised to avoid what we have now:

There is no doubt that the cost of this plan will be considerable.  It will certainly add to the budget deficit in the short-term.  …  It is true that we cannot depend on government alone to create jobs or long-term growth, but at this particular moment, only government can provide the short-term boost necessary to lift us from a recession this deep and severe.

We know now this was a lie. Prior to this Obama was more honest:

It will take time, perhaps many years, but we can rebuild that lost trust and confidence.

At least that is what he is saying now, today, after his boost never materialized and we learned it was never really there. Reading through the speech we can see multiple instances of reality mixed in with wild promises. It is a classic case of mixing truth and fiction to leave a false impression. A deliberately false impression.

That’s why the American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan won’t just throw money at our problems – we’ll invest in what works.  The true test of the policies we’ll pursue won’t be whether they’re Democratic or Republican ideas, but whether they create jobs, grow our economy, and put the American Dream within reach of the American people.

The policies failed. The test score was an “F”. So is it any wonder America is not ready to be fooled again. We won’t be fooled again.

Tags: Blue Dog Democrats, Health Care, Obama, Pelosi, Reid, Stimulus Bill, Unemployment