The following is an excerpt from OpinionJournal.com’s “Best of the Web” written by the editor, James Taranto.
‘Or Else I’ll Huff, and I’ll Puff . . .’
“Obama: Syria’s Assad Must Show ‘Concrete Actions’ on Chemical Weapons”–headline, Voice of America website, Sept. 14
Answers to Questions Nobody Is Asking
“Why Peter King Might Run for President”–headline, Politico.com, Sept. 13
About That Other Debacle
If you’re the kind of driver who can’t help but gawk at the wreckage when you pass an accident–and honestly, who isn’t?–you’ll enjoy today’s lengthy account in The Wall Street Journal of the runup to last week’s Putin-Assad triumph.
Right off the bat we learn, which is to say our suspicion is confirmed, that this was a case of a willful president with atrocious political instincts. When Obama consulted his cabinet and top staffers about the idea of seeking congressional approval for a strike in Syria, “senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer pegged the chances of Congress balking at 40%. . . . Mr. Obama took the gamble anyway and set aside the impending strikes to try to build domestic and international support for such action.”
In retrospect, it seems clear that while Pfeiffer was on the right track in warning that Congress might scuttle the plan, he underestimated the probability of that outcome. Given the political obstacles that stood in the way of the president’s call for authorization to use force–Republican control of the House, Democratic misgivings about military intervention, and, most important, crosspartisan public misgivings–it seems absurd to suggest Obama was ever likelier than not to win a vote.
In fact, one could make a case that the probability of gaining congressional assent was already so low as to be indistinguishable from zero on Aug. 31, when the president announced his request. The best counterargument is that in the ensuing days, Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry did such an inept job making their case that they worsened the odds. That would imply they had at least a slim chance of success to begin with.
“Leadership as we experience it in life is usually more declarative,” observes the Washington Post’s David Ignatius with considerable understatement; “Leaders take action, and people follow. But Obama’s style is different. As we’ve learned after nearly five years, he’s more cautious and deliberative.” We don’t think we take any substantive liberties when we rephrase Ignatius’s statement more bluntly: What he is saying is that Obama’s manner of executing his official duties, in this instance for sure, is unrecognizable as leadership by any ordinary understanding of the term.
Which brings us to the Affordable Care Act. Three and a half years after the springtime enactment of what was touted as Obama’s signature legislative achievement, it’s autumn for ObamaCare, with many of the law’s provisions taking effect Oct. 1, two weeks from tomorrow.
ObamaCare was another case in which the president asked Congress to act. That time, lawmakers granted his request, although for a time the odds seemed very much against their doing so. Unlike in 2013, in 2009-10 Republicans did not control the House. Unlike the idea of military intervention in Syria, ObamaCare did not go against the Democrats’ ideological grain.
But like the prospective Syria strike, ObamaCare lacked broad public support. It still does, as illustrated by a pair of polls out today, from The Wall Street Journal and USA Today.
The latter paper’s coverage of the polls is eyebrow-raising to say the least. Here is how reporter Susan Page’s story begins:
Republican lawmakers have failed in dozens of attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act, but a new USA Today/Pew Research Center Poll shows just how difficult they have made it for President Obama’s signature legislative achievement to succeed.
As the health care exchanges at the heart of the law open for enrollment in two weeks, the public’s views of it are as negative as they have ever been, and disapproval of the president’s handling of health care has hit a new high. Confusion and misinformation about the law haven’t significantly abated, especially among the law’s main targets.
The opening clause, noting that Republicans have failed to repeal the law, is true but trivial. Given the results of the 2010 and 2012 elections and the realities of bicameralism and the presidential veto, a repeal effort could have been successful by now only if it were broadly bipartisan–if it had the support of the president or a large number of Democratic lawmakers.
But where does Page get the idea that Republican lawmakers are the ones who have made it difficult for ObamaCare to succeed? That claim is not only unsupported but unsupportable. We’d go so far as to say it’s preposterous on its face.
Do political leaders respond to public opinion, or is it the other way around? When you put the question that way, it’s a chicken-and-egg conundrum: The influence goes both ways, and the mechanisms of causation are far more complicated than the oviparous reproductive cycle in which a particular chicken hatches from an egg and goes on to lay another one.
But in this case the overall direction of causation is clear, and it is the opposite of what Page suggests. ObamaCare has lacked broad public support from its inception in 2009, when there were not enough Republican lawmakers to stop it from being enacted. The Republican House majority is an effect of ObamaCare, not the other way around.
“When Obama signed the law more than three years ago, supporters predicted Americans would embrace it as some of the most popular provisions went into effect,” Page observes farther down in the story. “But that turnaround in public opinion hasn’t happened, at least not yet.”
In the USA Today poll (which is of adults, not registered voters), only 26% strongly approve of ObamaCare; 41% strongly disapprove, just one point shy of the proportion who approve at all, even “not so strongly.” Total disapproval is 53%.The same proportion disapprove of “the way Obama is handling health care policy,” traditionally a Democratic strength.
Quite apart from the law’s merits, what Page has described is an enormous political miscalculation. Unlike in the Syria case, Obama had the political strength to push this legislation through Congress (if barely). But while it’s easy to imagine he was and remains disdainful of public opinion on the matter, it’s almost certain that he expected it to turn around by now. In a White House address today, the president tried to rationalize away the political adversity noting to applause from supporters that in the 2012 presidential election, “the candidate who called for repeal lost.”
Page’s formulation of Republicans’ making it difficult for the law to succeed by influencing public opinion is not only wrongheaded as an analytical matter but is a clear expression of partisan bias. GOP lawmakers are not some exogenous force but democratically elected members of a coequal branch of government. (The Journal’s Louise Radnofsky, by contrast, presents the paper’s findings neutrally: “New poll results show the depth of the Obama administration’s challenge on the eve of the rollout of the federal health law’s core provisions, as many Americans say they don’t understand the law and don’t think it will help them.”)
Of course an implication of ObamaCare’s delayed timetable for implementation is that it has not yet been put to an empirical test. Although Page seems to be betraying a partisan hope when she qualifies her observation about continued public opposition with “at least not yet,” it is possible that expectations of failure will prove to be wrong–that the public will learn to stop worrying and love ObamaCare.
Is it likely? Warren Buffett doesn’t think so, as MoneyMorning.com reports:
Healthcare costs in the United States are like a tapeworm eating at our economic body.
Those words come from famed investor Warren Buffett, who said he would scrap Obamacare and start all over. . . .
“What we have now is untenable over time,” said Buffett, an early supporter of President Obama. “That kind of a cost compared to the rest of the world is really like a tapeworm eating, you know, at our economic body.”
Buffett does not believe that providing insurance for everyone is the first step to take in correcting our nation’s healthcare system.
“Attack the costs first, and then worry about expanding coverage,” he said. “I would much rather see another plan that really attacks costs. And I think that’s what the American public wants to see. I mean, the American public is not behind this bill.”
To be sure, in citing Buffett we are making an appeal to authority, and an authority whose pronouncements we’re generally apt to reject. But that’s what makes it a fun appeal to authority.
Another reason to be skeptical that ObamaCare will prove skeptics wrong is that even experts who support it don’t seem to grasp how it is supposed to work. Consider this quote, from a Los Angeles Daily News report about the Trader Joe’s grocery chain’s decision to stop providing health insurance to part-time employees:
Trader Joe’s may remain a rarity in dropping benefits, as it’s “relatively uncommon” for employers to offer coverage to part-time workers in the first place, said Larry Levitt, a senior vice-president at the Kaiser Family Foundation, a Menlo Park, California-based nonprofit group that studies health policy.
“I wouldn’t be at all surprised that low-wage, part-time workers would generally be better off with the tax credits in exchanges,” Levitt said in an e-mail. “These workers may be a young, healthy bunch who would help the risk pool. At least they seem to be at my local Trader Joe’s”
“Help the risk pool” is actuarial jargon. What it means in the context of ObamaCare price controls is “overpay for insurance” (so that older and sicker policyholders in turn can underpay). In other words, if you “help the risk pool,” that means you are worse off, not better off, under ObamaCare. The expectation that public opinion will turn around when people see the benefits of ObamaCare assumes that they will somehow fail to see the costs.
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