You really, really have to go over and read the entire column by Shikha Dalmia over at Forbes. No, really, you do.
A very, very brief excerpt from a must-read:
In fact, the real reason why ObamaCare is so unpopular is that it is proposing a giant expansion of the entitlement state precisely when this state everywhere is coming apart: here and abroad; at the federal level and the state; in the public sector and the private. Suggesting a giant government takeover of a sixth of the economy can’t be a popular selling point in a country whose DNA has a programmed hostility to Big Government.
Please go read it.
Here’s the thing that I am seeing right now. The media continues to perform CPR on the Democrat’s plots to pass this monstrosity. Every day there are stories of how close they are to a deal, how great everything is going. How confident they are.
But the House has still not voted.
If Pelosi had the votes, this would already be passed.
If the House Democrats – the non-suicidal ones – had any trust in the Senate Democrats ability to pass a reconciliation, this would be done.
And a lot – a real lot – of Democrats would be gainfully unemployed come November. And the Democrat brand will be crippled if not utterly destroyed.
And Obama would be a lame duck with no other role left than to be the one who sets his successor up for untangling Obama’s wreckage and becoming a truly great president. This is more than Obama’s Waterloo. This is Obama’s political Little Bighorn.
Garryowen, Democrats. You can commit political suicide by following this narcissist over the cliff and into the valley, thereby wrecking your party and your personal political futures or you can recognize that this bill is a disaster and save yourselves – and your nation – from utter ruin.
He is not the one and this is not the bill.
Zero’s spent the last year whining about the mess he inherited. It’s nothing compared to the mess he’s going to leave behind in 2012.
Gaius, thanks for the link. Excellent read. I like Dalmia’s explanation for why the Democrats blindly insist on pressing so hard for such unpopular legislation.
“So why didn’t the Democrats pull back when they still had the chance? The reason is that both the Democratic Party and President Obama have mutually reinforcing blind spots that have rendered them incapable of seeing what’s crystal clear to every other sentient being in the country: This was the wrong bill at the wrong time.”
Just wanted to drop in a note.
You do excellent writing. Please keep it up.
frequent visitor number 3
I particularly liked this passage: “A sensible president would of course step in and provide some adult supervision to a wayward party hell-bent on jumping off this cliff. But the problem is that President Obama believes in his own messianism too deeply for that. His goal is not to remake his party as it could be but “remake this world as it should be.” In his book Dreams From My Father Obama gives the distinct impression that his gifts are too great for the smallness of our political stage. He regrets not having been born during the civil rights era when the grandness of the cause would have measured up to the grandness of his ambition. He is in search of something big that will allow him to make his mark on the world as Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King did. Hence, the defeat of ObamaCare would not just be par for the course in the rough-and-tumble world of politics for him. It would be sign of his ordinariness, his mortality, and that, to him, is unendurable.”