It feels pretty good to watch the whole thing fail.
By Jonah Goldberg
To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, you’d have to have a heart of stone not to laugh at the unraveling of Obamacare.
First,
the obligatory caveats. It is no laughing matter that millions of
Americans’ lives have been thrown into anxious chaos as they lose their
health insurance, their doctors, their money, or all three. Nor is it
particularly amusing to think of the incredible waste of time and tax
dollars that has gone into Obamacare’s construction. And the
still-unfolding violence that this misbegotten legislation will visit on
the economy and our liberties is not funny either. This very magazine
has been downright funereal about the brazen and unconstitutional
seizure of one-sixth of the economy, and rightly so.
But come on, people.
If
you can’t take some joy, some modicum of relief and mirth, in the
unprecedentedly spectacular beclowning of the president, his
administration, its enablers, and, to no small degree, liberalism
itself, then you need to ask yourself why you’re following politics in
the first place. Because, frankly, this has been one of the most
enjoyable political moments of my lifetime. I wake up in the morning and
rush to find my just-delivered newspaper with a joyful expectation of
worsening news so intense, I feel like Morgan Freeman should be
narrating my trek to the front lawn. Indeed, not since Dan Rather
handcuffed himself to a fraudulent typewriter, hurled it into the abyss,
and saw his career plummet like Ted Kennedy was behind the wheel have I
enjoyed a story more.
Alas, the English language is not well
equipped to capture the sensation I’m describing, which is why we must
all thank the Germans for giving us the term “schadenfreude” — the joy
one feels at the misfortune or failure of others. The primary wellspring
of schadenfreude can be attributed to Barack Obama’s hubris — another
immigrant word, which means a sinful pride or arrogance that causes
someone to believe he has a godlike immunity to the rules of life.
The hubris of our ocean-commanding commander-in-chief surely isn’t
news to readers of this website. He’s said that he’s smarter and better
than everyone who works for him. His wife informed us that he has
“brought us out of the dark and into the light” and that he would fix
our broken souls. The man defined sin itself as “being out of alignment
with my values.” We may be the ones we’ve been waiting for, but at the
same time, everyone has been waiting for him. Or as he put it in 2007,
“Every place is Barack Obama country once Barack Obama’s been there.”
In
every tale of hubris, the transgressor is eventually slapped across the
face with the semi-frozen flounder of reality. The Greeks had a god,
Nemesis, whose scythe performed the same function. It was Nemesis who
lured Narcissus to the pool where he fell in love with his own
reflection. Admittedly, most of Nemesis’s walk-on roles were in the
Greek tragedies, but in the modern era, comeuppance-for-the-arrogant is
more often found in comedies, and the “rollout” of Healthcare.gov has
been downright hilarious. (I put quotation marks around “rollout”
because the term implies actual rolling, and this thing has
moved as gracefully as a grand piano in a peat bog.) But, as the
president says, “it’s more than a website.” Indeed, the whole law is
coming apart like a papier-mâché yacht in rough waters. The media
feeding frenzy it has triggered from so many journalistic lapdogs has
been both so funny and so poignant, it reminds me of nothing more than
the climax of the classic film Air Bud, when the lovable basketball-playing golden retriever finally decides to maul the dog-abusing clown.
During
the government shutdown, Barack Obama held fast, heroically refusing to
give an inch to the hostage-taking, barbaric orcs of the Tea Party who
insisted on delaying Obamacare. It was a triumph for the master
strategist in the White House, who finally maneuvered the Republicans
into revealing their extremism. But we didn’t know something back then:
Obama desperately needed a delay of Healthcare.gov. In his arrogance,
though, he couldn’t bring himself to admit it. The other possibility is
that he is such an incompetent manager, who has cultivated such a
culture of yes-men, that he was completely in the dark about the
problems. That’s the reigning storyline right now from the White House.
Obama was betrayed. “If I had known,” he told his staff, “we could have
delayed the website.”
This is how you know we’re in the political
sweet spot: when the only plausible excuses for the administration are
equally disastrous indictments.
In the wake of Hurricane Katrina,
it took about five minutes for liberals to cast the chaos and confusion
of the disaster as a searing indictment of not just the Bush
administration but of conservatism itself. Whatever the merits of that
argument (and there are not many), Katrina was at least a surprise. The
October 1 deadline for Obamacare was set by Obama’s own administration
years ago — and it caught them completely off guard. The president may
now claim that he knew nothing, but he must have wondered why Henry
Chao, Healthcare.gov’s chief project manager, set the bar of success at
sea level last March: “Let’s just make sure it’s not a Third World
experience.” At this point, it could only be more of a Third World
experience if Healthcare.gov required enrollees to pay with chickens.
Regardless, if Obama were a tenth as good a politician as he thinks
he is, he could have blamed the delay he desperately needed on his
political enemies, calling them “hostage-takers” even as he secretly
understood they had rescued his most beloved hostage from his own
incompetence. Instead, on September 26, he went out and told an adoring
audience: “On October 1, millions of Americans . . . will finally be
able to buy quality, affordable health insurance. In five days.”
“Starting Tuesday,” he added, Americans will be able to “compare and
purchase affordable health-insurance plans, side by side, the same way
you shop for a plane ticket on Kayak — same way you shop for a TV on
Amazon. You just go on and you start looking, and here are all the
options.”
Come on, that’s hilarious.
Okay, maybe he didn’t know then what bad shape the website was in. But how to explain the president’s remarks three weeks after
the debut of Healthcare.gov? Even if it’s true that the president only
hears about bad news from the newspapers, by then the papers were full
of reports that Healthcare.gov worked about as well as a Somali
superconducting supercollider. Obama knew that Healthcare.gov was a
fiasco, and that the “navigators” used the same broken website that
consumers had spent days poking at like Chinatown chickens in an
abandoned tic-tac-toe machine, desperately but fruitlessly trying to get
some reward.
And yet the president strode out into the Rose
Garden anyway and told millions of Americans they could buy their
coverage by phone. He told them the 1-800 operators were standing by. He
told them it would take only 25 minutes to apply. None of these things
were true. In his mind, Obama surely thought he was putting the issue to
rest, like Zeus declaring that Odysseus would make it home alive. But
here’s the thing: All that Zeus needs to do to make something happen is
to say it. When Barack Obama says things, reality doesn’t bend to his
will. Somehow, Barack Obama has been led to believe that his job is
simply to go out and say things, as if saying things alone could change
facts on the ground. So while I’m sure he thinks he sounded like the
voice of eternal truth, in reality he sounded like the infomercial
spokesman played by Chevy Chase in the old Saturday Night Live skit:
WIFE (GILDA RADNER): New Shimmer is a floor wax!
HUSBAND (DAN AYKROYD): No, new Shimmer is a dessert topping!
WIFE: It’s a floor wax!
HUSBAND: It’s a dessert topping!
WIFE: It’s a floor wax, I’m telling you!
HUSBAND: It’s a dessert topping, you cow!
SPOKESMAN [enters quickly]: Hey, hey, hey, calm down, you two. New Shimmer is a floor wax and a dessert topping! Here, I’ll spray some on your mop . . . and some on your butterscotch pudding . . .
HUSBAND [eating while wife mops]: Mmmmm, tastes terrific!
WIFE: And just look at that shine! But will it last?
SPOKESMAN: Hey, outlasts every other leading floor wax, two to one. It’s durable, and it’s scuff-resistant.
HUSBAND: And it’s delicious!
But
not as delicious as the tears of his praetorian guard. First of all,
every day Jay Carney looks even more like a little boy who put on his
dad’s suit. You have to wonder what goes on in his mind, as a former
journalist, when he tells his former colleagues that “the American
forces have been completely destroyed with minimal Iraqi casualties.”
(Oh, wait, that was Baghdad Bob. I get them confused.) And what about
Dan Pfeiffer going on the Sunday shows to insist that no American should
believe his or her lying eyes?
On October 1, Media Matters for
America — David Brock’s sweatshop for twentysomethings who couldn’t get
an internship at the DNC — raced to defend the crashed website as a sign
of success, in keeping with the idea that all Obama failures are
further proof of his awesomeness: “Right-Wing Media Frantically Spin
Obamacare Exchange Success Into Failure.” Taking their cues from the
White House, MMFA insisted that the administration’s only mistake was
failing to appreciate just how popular the program would be. “Right-wing
media were quick to jump on the problems, declaring them a sign of the
law’s shortcomings rather than its popularity,” cackled MMFA’s Samantha
Wyatt. She went on to mock various Fox News journalists and, of course,
Rush Limbaugh for calling the disastrous launch a disaster. Meanwhile,
Ezra Klein called the initial popularity of the site exactly “what the
Republicans were afraid of.” Now even Klein has turned on the White
House — more in sorrow than in anger, to be sure. When the White House
has lost Ezra Klein . . . well, it still has the cast of Morning Joe. No, wait — even they have abandoned the president. Heh.
To
be sure, there was some apparent plausibility to the claim that the
website was working only too well, because the White House lied so
confidently about what was going on. Few critics grasped at first that
this was going to be the Charlie Sheen of IT launches — a spectacularly
mortifying failure, punctuated with desperate shrieks of “Winning!”
It
wasn’t until later that we learned that, of the uncountable hordes
flocking to the federal exchanges that first day, the number who
actually registered for an insurance plan totaled exactly six. At that
rate, Obamacare would reach its target of 7 million enrollees around the
year 5013, or 3022 a.o. (Anno Obamae).
Obviously, the website will get better. It could hardly get worse,
short of a finding that it causes irritable bowel syndrome. Indeed, on
the second day, the number of enrollees hit 248, according to the same
leaked contractor memos. But the site needs to be able to handle tens of
thousands of enrollees per day.
More recent numbers suggest that
the federal exchange has enrolled about 27,000 customers since October
1, which amounts to about half an enrollee for each Obamacare
“navigator.” (Someone in the White House is surely thinking, “Hey, let’s
just hire another 14,000,000 navigators! Problem solved.) In order to
rationalize that dismal performance the White House now must insist that
they always knew the numbers would be tiny at the outset.
Here’s a number that isn’t tiny: Five million people — and counting — have lost
their health insurance, despite the president’s years of “you can keep
your plan” promises. The president has apologized, sort of. He says he’s
“sorry” that people have found themselves in a bad situation because of
“assurances” he made. But no one has lost their insurance because of
the president’s assurances, they’ve lost their insurance because of the president’s law.
If a captain has the lifejackets filled with cement, his assurance that
“you can keep your lifejacket” is only half the crime. Obama knew the
lifejackets wouldn’t work. In 2010 he admitted that 8 to 9 million
people in the individual market might “have to change their coverage”
because of the law. And that’s just the individual market. Millions more
will eventually lose the insurance they like because of Obamacare,
according to the administration’s own internal estimates.
The cancellations aren’t a bug, they’re a feature, and the president lied about it over and over again.
And
now the Democratic panic has begun. Terry McAuliffe almost lost his bid
for Virginia governor because of Obamacare. Senator Kay Hagan of North
Carolina has seen her double-digit lead against a generic Republican all
but vanish. Henry “let’s avoid a Third World experience” Chao is now
insisting he never got the memo warning of “limitless” security
problems. And, just this week, the big dog himself, Bill Clinton,
announced he thinks Obama should honor the “commitment” the federal
government made to Americans that they can keep their health insurance.
Clinton’s brazenness is a marvel to behold, given that he surely knew
all along that Obama’s “incorrect promise” — to borrow the New York Times’
latest desperate euphemism — was a lie and yet he happily defended the
law. Moreover, he knows that honoring that commitment would, in fact,
permanently gut Obamacare.
Which is one reason why Republicans are
proposing a law that would do exactly that with the “Keep Your Health
Care Plan” Act. This creates a miserable predicament for Democrats. As
Jim Geraghty writes: “Can you picture the ads? Senator
[Insert Democrat Here] voted for the Obamacare law that took away your
health insurance . . . and then voted against the Keep Your Health Plan
Act.”
Democrats are in the opening stages of the
crab-in-a-trap phase. When crabs are caught in a trap they will try to
climb out of their predicament. The problem is that other crabs will
grab the would-be-escapee and pull them down. When the really nasty
infighting starts, as countless Democrats look to fix or delay the law,
I’m looking forward to pointing out that such an agenda was once
considered “extreme,” even “racist,” by Democrats. Or to quote Harry
Reid from last September: “Obamacare has been the law for four years.
Why don’t they get a life and talk about something else?”
It would
be great fun to watch Reid say something similar to the throngs of
panicked fellow Democrats racing for the exits like the Irish peasants
below decks on the Titanic. Reid, of course, is just desperate to buy
time. He hopes to make it to November 30, the appointed date when the
White House still insists it will be able to say, “Behold the power of
this fully functional website!” Politically speaking, with every day
still producing another terrible story for the White House, that is the
sort of timeline that would make Godot look punctual. And that’s if they
hit the deadline. So far, the press has been unable to produce a
prominent IT expert willing to say on the record that the target date is
feasible. Jay Carney is sticking to that promise, but the musky stench
of fear, sweat, and urine wafting from the podium makes it hard for all
but the true believers to put much stock in his words.
But let’s assume HHS secretary Kathleen Sebelius makes the most of that copy of Web Sites for Dummies that a protester handed her at a town-hall meeting last week.
Then what?
We
have a hint from Colorado, where the state’s own version of
Healthcare.gov has been up and running. Al Jazeera America interviewed
one of Colorado’s exchange navigators a month after the debut. When
asked how many people she had signed up, she replied, “So far, no one.
Thus far everybody has taken a look at the rates and they’ve walked out
the door. There’s sticker shock. They just can’t afford it.” Medicaid
has been driving most of the enrollments, and those who have ended up in
private plans are older and poorer on average than the planners had
hoped.
Every day, the supposedly conspiratorial right-wing smear
that Obama cared more about economic redistribution than he did about
the middle class or economic growth looks more reasonable. Surely we’re
allowed to say, “We told you so”?
As a matter of public policy and fiscal health, this is a mixed bag.
It’s good that poor sick people without insurance coverage are getting
something. On the other side of the scale, we have the fact that the
country is racing toward entitlement-fueled bankruptcy. So if you can
overlook that, yippee!
But as a political and ideological matter,
this is beyond fantastic. For years we’ve been told that Democrats were
more “reality-based,” that “facts have a liberal bias,” in the words of
Paul Krugman, and that if they could just have their way, they could fix
all of our problems. No one represented this arrogant promise more than
Barack Obama himself. But, with an irony so rich it would be made of
Corinthian leather if it was a car seat, the only way he could get his
signature legislation passed was to baldly and brazenly lie about it,
over and over and over again. He created a rhetorical cloud castle where
no one would lose his insurance, every family would save thousands of
dollars, and millions of the uninsured would suddenly get coverage.
Anyone who doubted this was called a fool or a liar, or even a racist.
It was, in the parlance of liberalism, a “false choice” to assert that
Obamacare couldn’t be a floor wax and a dessert topping.
And
all of this — every bit of it — is their own fault. The bedraggled
cadres of Obama’s defenders are valiantly trying to blame it all on
Republican sabotage: The Obama administration had to keep the whole
thing secret for fear of “feeding the opposition,” in the words of a Washington Post
reconstruction of the debacle. But when you read the stories, if you
replace phrases like “keep the Republicans from finding out” with the
more accurate “keep the public from finding out,” you’ll get a better
sense of things. The Obama White House, by which I mean the Obama
campaign, was desperate to keep voters from grasping the scope of its
misinformation campaign until after the election. And then, after the
election, it was afraid to let the public know what they’d been
misinformed about.
The argument against gloating holds that
conservatives should want Obamacare to succeed even though we said all
along it couldn’t. It’s such an odd argument, particularly since the
Democrats’ lies were of the first order, in that Obama’s aides actually
debated and discussed them, no doubt presenting them to focus groups
like a jar of “new Shimmer, now an erectile-dysfunction treatment and
paint thinner all in one!”
When a product is brought to market and
the market discovers — as it eventually has to — that the advertising
wasn’t merely a tissue of lies but a geological stratum of lies, the
utterly fair and justified response from the critics is “I told you so!”
— not “Let’s make this thing bipartisan now.” That’s particularly true
when the president continues to lie. On September 26 he said, “If you
already have health care, you don’t have to do anything” to keep your
plan. On November 3 he said, “What we said was you could keep [your
plan] if it hasn’t been changed.” Who knew that dozens of flat
declarative statements — “You can keep your plan. Period” — were trailed
by a cloud of asterisks like so many invisible fireflies?
If
Obamacare had been a shining success from Day One, do you think the
Democrats would be in the mood to share the credit? Then why should
Republicans be in more of a mood to share the blame?
Feel free to
cross your fingers that reality will bend to the gravitational pull of
Obama’s stellar ego, his invincible hubris. As for me, I’ll be sitting
on the sidelines cheering on Nemesis, with joy in my heart.
1 comment:
`Yes i'm laughing, and watching the lib party come apart at the seams.
LMAO
Kirk72
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