Sep 15 2009
Obamacare Rejected
The President clearly did not close the deal on overhauling our national health care in his speech to Congress last week:
Six in 10 say Obama’s proposal, if enacted, would not achieve his goals of expanding coverage to nearly all Americans without raising taxes on the middle class or lowering the quality of health care. For the first time, a majority disapprove of the way he’s handling health care policy.
60% did not fall for the PR spin and carefully crafted language. No one is buying the idea we will perform all this change, expand all the coverage and have it not cost a dime (be revenue neutral). Worse, no one bought the dodge the bill ‘does not require’ anyone to change their health care coverage. We all know it will impact all of us sooner or later.
The only question now is what will the consensus be on the motivation behind the failed PR spin? Is our President naive, but well intentioned? Or is he conniving, but clumsy at it? Or is he just incompetent?
Update: Thomas Sowell captures the quintessential problem with Obamacare and its Infomercial Promotions:
Many years ago, as a small child, I was told one of those old-fashioned fables for children. It was about a dog with a bone in his mouth, who was walking on a log across a stream.
The dog looked down into the water and saw his reflection. He thought it was another dog with a bone in his mouth– and it seemed to him that the other dog’s bone was bigger than his. He decided that he was going to take the other dog’s bone away and opened his mouth to attack. The result was that his own bone fell into the water and was lost.
…
Today we are living in a time when the President of the United States is telling us that he is going to help us take that other dog’s bone away– and the end result is likely to be very much like what it was in that children’s fable.
Whether we are supposed to take that bone away from the doctors, the hospitals, the pharmaceutical companies or the insurance companies, the net result is likely to be the same– most of us will end up with worse medical care than we have available today. We will have opened our mouth and dropped a very big bone into the water.
The DC liberals have been promoting a facade, window dressing to hide their intentions to make health care a government rationed right. And no matter how much lipstick they put on that pig, Americas will be making bacon bits out of it every time.
Update: Looking at the internals the poll is even more of a blow to the Democrats and our young President. For example:
- Obama had a +28% approval on health care in April, now it is 0%.
- Obama had a +26% approval on the economy in April, now it is +5%
- Obama had a +9% approval on the deficit in April, now it is -5%
What is really frightening for the left is the trend of these numbers. In another 6 months (after months of record unemployment through Thanksgiving and Christmas) does any one think these will still be the numbers? Is there anything on the horizon that would turn these around? Would the Dems forcing through health care reform over the objection of the public concerns and without bipartisan support turn these around?
I seriously doubt the Dems have seen the bottom of this trend yet.
Rasmussen: Support for Health Care Plan Falls Back To Pre-Speech Levels
http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/current_events/healthcare/september_2009/health_care_reform
That didn’t take long.
AJ,
Great Presidents put into words what is in people’s hearts and minds but not their mouths.
On healthcare, and much else, Sarah Palin seems to have that gift.
Obama does not.
The last Democratic President who could do this was John Kennedy.
The last GOP President who could do it was Ronald Reagan.
Obama’s real problem on health care is that what the Democrats really want is power and control over people’s health care and that just does not sell with the American people.
The core of Obama’s, and the Democrats’, “Message problem” in selling their health care plans is that they are lying.
It is much more difficult to promote a single consistent message which is *inconsistent* with the actual objective, rather than one which is consistent. This is particuarly the case with a national political objective.
The ultimate objective of the Democratic health care plans is not to help the uninsured or to lower health care costs.
It is to nationalize the vast existing private health care oversight industry (insurance, etc.) and make them all public employees who will then contribute money to the Democratic Party the way public education employees do
I.e., the Democrats intend to turn the existing huge, but as-yet mostly private, health bureacracy into another part of the Democratic Party’s public employee client base.
Paid for by constant reductions in actual health care, just as the public education budget is increasingly devoured by administrative overhead.
And just like what is happening right now with the British National Health Service.
Older Americans have easily twice the life experiance of the Obama spinmeisters and can see right through this PR campaign to those facts.
This is shaping up to be a political earthquake bigger than 1994, which has the potential to reach New Deal proportions, because the lefties running Congress and the Obama administration will keep pushing single payer government health care, and thereby threatening old folks’ survival interests, long after less ideological Democrats realize the peril.
The Obama administration people lack the experience to recognize the problem, while the Democratic Congressional leadership is far more interested in campaign contributions from the lefty base than in votes on election day (because they have invulnerable constituencies).
While Guns were an identity issue for the gun huggers in 1994, Health Care is a _survival issue_ for the elderly, disabled, and their relatives.
Obama is about to learn the first rule of politics — Don’t attack an opponent’s vital interests unless you are willing to risk your own.
This is something Bill Clinton knew in his bones, which was why he dropped healthcare reform in exchange for the more popular Republican style welfare reform.
Obama doesn’t appear to be that smart. He should be focusing on the economy to the exclusion of everything else to save Congressional Democrats in 2010 and himself in 2012.
He isn’t.
The elderly people who the Democrats have verbally dissed, physically intimidated, and threatened with single payer healthcare destroying private medical insurance have both money and options.
They have had good private insurance medical care their whole lives *and* they also have the resources to sue private insurers for cause and win.
They can’t do that with the Federal government. For them, government universal healthcare represents a clear and present danger to their survival and their quality of life.
The fatal wedge issue between Democrats and elderly voters has appeared, and the consequences will not be limited to ObamaCare.
The Democrats and the left as groups (they are two distinctly different groups) simply cannot accept that single payer is such a wedge issue because they’ve made it an identity issue for themselves.
The left will IMO never get past this. The Democrats will, but that will take at least a generation, and possibly two generations, at which point the country’s demographics will have changed so much as to possibly defuse the issue, i.e., after all the Boomers die.
The Democratic _Party_ problem here is that the party overall has devoted more than 35 years of effort into single-payer in terms of study, think-tanks, candidate development, etc. I.e., the Democratic party overall simply cannot back away from this one, however much individual candidates, even most of them, might want to.
The Democrats have invested too much into single-payer for them to abandon it.
This is a self-identification issue for them as much as the Left.
In terms of political effects, though, it’s their tar baby. They can’t let go of it and will keep pushing it long after it is politically hopeless. Plus their continued pushing of it will remind senior voters with money that the Democrats threaten the seniors’ survival interests.
It looks like a perfect storm, politically, for the Democrats and the Left both.
Trent,
That comment looks like a great post!
National polls are really not that important. It is the polls in the blue dog districts and in conservative states with Democratic Senators.
I would love to see an Obamacare poll in NE.