“All battles are won before they’re fought,” said Sun Tzu, the legendary Chinese military strategist. As we move through an August striking for its citizen uprising over pending health care legislation, you can’t help but wonder if Team Obama lost this battle long before we ever got to the summer.
Think back and consider the bounty of political riches that were showered on President-elect Obama after the November election.
A credible and decisive election win without the necessity of recounts. A seminal and transformational victory that tangibly recast the state of race relations in the United States, which in itself was a metaphor for the kind of post-partisan politics that Obama had promised the nation during the campaign.
This provided Obama with unheard of moral and political credibility.
In addition, the election provided augmented majorities for Democrats in Congress. The eventual defection of Arlen Specter and the resolution of the Minnesota Senate seat in 2009, gave the new President a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate for the first time since 1977.
Right there, at the apex of victory, with his opponents’ broken, dispirited and scattered, with America hungry for unity and leadership, Team Obama could have made an inspired choice. Obama, a noted fan of President Lincoln, could have usefully employed the spirit of the 16th President’s second inaugural:
With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and his orphan…to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.
Instead, Team Obama made three enormously consequential decisions that would eventually shape this summer of discontent.
1) Long Ball: Team Obama decided that they would push all his major legislative initiatives at the same time on the belief that Americans would be more sympathetic to large, government solutions amid market chaos and recession.
2) Governing from the Left: Candidate Obama talked like a modern centrist, criticizing corruption, runaway spending and pork laden earmarks, and promising fiscal reform and restraint. He promised transparency and accountability in government. He promised a clean environment, new jobs and a government that rewarded the middle class. He promised common sense health care reform to make health care accessible and affordable for all Americans.
But in practice Team Obama has governed from the Left almost immediately.
The Stimulus legislation was the largest spending bill in American history; a colossal and dubious bill that relied on old fashioned government pump-priming and liberal interest group wish lists, written in secret and passed by Democrats without debate or amendment.
Obama’s priority on Cap N’ Trade and the drafting of health care bills were handled in much the same way, crafted in backrooms, rammed through Congress with only a modicum of debate and amendment, with a focus and priority on fulfilling liberal interest group priorities.
3) Quarterbacking from the Sidelines: from the beginning, Obama acted more like a coach than a quarterback, deferred to congressional leaders on the content and implementation of his overall legislative priorities. With Pelosi, Frank, Rangel, Waxman, Reid, Dodd, Kennedy, Durbin and the like filling in the blanks, post-partisanship, accountability and responsibility went out the window in favor hyper-partisanship, special-interest politics and ideology. This has had a most corrosive effect on the Obama agenda writ large, turning the priceless “change” paradigm into ulcerous politics as usual.
The result of these changes was a political team that defaulted to form. Instead of reaching out to defeated opponents, the President kept lecturing that those whose ideas differed with his own that he had won the election.
Instead of binding up the wounds of a divisive period of American history as he had promised during the campaign, the new President went to extraordinary lengths to inflame divisions by dwelling on the past, going so far as to denounce the policies of a previous administration multiple times to international audiences in a traveling road show that seemed petty and bitter, and which diminished the office of the President, making Obama seem like an ordinary politician.
By supporting legislative speed over quality, by abandoning the rhetorical centrism of his campaign, by delegating operational details to his congressional colleagues, their tacit hyper-partisanship and embracing their leftist results, the new President found himself facing a potential perfect storm with the American people over his cherished priority – health care – based on his record to date.
- · The Stimulus has failed to stimulate, as 2.2 million more Americans joined the unemployed since its passage and growth continued to sag.
- · The Cap N’ Trade bill produced by the House, which taxes anything that doesn’t breathe and essentially reorders the economy by government fiat, creates scarcity and diminishes economic growth and job creation has no net effect on global warming, ostensibly its intended purpose.
- · And amid an economy battered by financial collapse, facing the prospect of newly expansive government spending, invasive government intrusions into the private sector and growth retarding tax increases, the red ink that Obama had campaigned against has exploded on a level never seen in American history.
America has often been called the “Sleeping Giant.” Slow to anger, but fiery and consequential once roused. And after assessing promises of post-partisanship, responsible spending and government accountability against the reality of expansive government control and unchecked spending, exploding debt and a still sickly economy, Americans have begun to wake up.
The health care debate is now ground zero for Democrats and the American people.
It is a debate, based on their prior actions, that Obama and the Democrats have already lost.
Having been heavy-handed, overreaching, secretive, ideologically narrow and arrogant in their public policy actions to date, Democrats now find that their credibility is being tested as they apply these tactics to health care.
Looking back, how do you square the scare tactics and rosy promises that Team Obama employed to get the Stimulus passed against what are at best sketchy results? How do you square the “if this is the answer, what was the question” construction of the Stimulus that seems to reward Democratic special interests without impacting the economy? How do you square staged White House events trumpeting Stimulus success against the raw statistics that show dismal performance in the private sector including lost growth and millions of jobs?
With that in mind, how do you square Presidential assurances to average Americans about health coverage, cost and treatment when the health care legislation undermine the claims? The health care bills themselves bleed together from the sharp cuts of logic that undermine individual provisions that cannot carry their own weight in public. The thousand cuts blur into an unmanageable blob of invasive, cost prohibitive, scarcity producing, government managed health care, leaving one to conclude again that if this is the answer to health care in America, what was the question.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
The town hall meetings where health care has been the dominant topic have only reinforced this skepticism which has usefully exposed the ignorance of Members of Congress to their own actions – even the astonishing claim that the bills they write are too long to read – and it has highlighted the smug, elitist contempt that the cloistered Members and the White House have for American citizens who dare to question their handy-work.
Instead of seeing town hall interest and advocacy as a reality check and the best possible expression of vibrant democracy, town hall attendees have been branded as “angry mobs” using “Brown shirt tactics.” Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House, called the participants “un-American.” In a hilarious irony, Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid said the town hall attendees were “sabotaging the democratic process.”
It bears pointing out that even in the middle of the most divisive protests against the Iraq War, when Bush was compared to Hitler, neither President Bush nor Denny Hastert – then Speaker of the House – ever called war opponents un-American. Nor did the Bush White House ask for citizens to snitch by email on neighbors who took positions at odds with the President, as this White House has done. A President who as Senator stood against wire tapping foreign terrorists seems only too eager to compile lists of uncooperative Americans. Someone at the White House should check out the pitfalls Sedition Act of 1798, which was passed and used against Americans who exercised their First Amendment rights.
The President’s hollow assurances on health care, defined in part by his unfilled promises on the economy, has, in conjunction with the angry reaction of Democratic lawmakers to average Americans at town halls, fundamentally changed the health care debate.
President Obama will sign a health care bill this year. Democrats won’t hang their own man out to dry on what he himself has said is his single most important legislative priority. They have the votes.
But the bill will look nothing like the legislation that is floating around the House and Senate now. What makes it through Conference and to the President’s desk will be streamlined, conventional, achievable and affordable. Anything more threatens electoral dangers that could imperil the midterms, the rest of Obama’s term, and conceivably, his reelection.
If there is angst here, it should be focused on Obama’s leadership. He promised something different during the campaign; united change. In practice, he has been the most conventional of politicians, rewarding loyal constituencies, marginalizing opponents and insisting upon his course.
Obama supporters defend the President by saying he is doing nothing that other presidents before had not already done. In making that point, supporters unwittingly defeat their own argument and the premise of Obama inspired change.