Thursday, November 14, 2013
Welcome to Wonkbook, Ezra Klein and Evan Soltas's morning policy news primer. Send comments, criticism, or ideas to Wonkbook at Gmail dot com. To read more by Ezra and his team, go to Wonkblog.
President Obama's second term began with two clear projects. The first was to successfully launch the Affordable Care Act. "If we don't get that right, nothing else matters," Obama would tell his staff. The second was to pass comprehensive immigration reform.
Today, both efforts are in tatters.
The Affordable Care Act continues to struggle, and despite the White House's insistence to the contrary, there's mounting skepticism that HealthCare.gov will be functioning smoothly come December 1st. The result is a real challenge to the law: Congressional Democrats are defecting and considering legislative "fixes" that could undermine the law once it is functional.
Meanwhile, Speaker John Boehner hammered a final nail into the coffin of immigration reform on Tuesday. Speaking after a closed-door meeting of House Republicans, he ruled out a vote on comprehensive immigration reform. "The idea that we're going to take up a 1,300-page bill that no one had ever read, which is what the Senate did, is not going to happen in the House," Boehner said. He also warned that "We have no intention of ever going to conference on the Senate bill."
As Frank Sharry, executive director of the pro-reform alliance America's Vote, told Greg Sargent, "[Boehner's] painting himself into a corner with procedural concessions to the far right, where failure is the only possible outcome." There will be no immigration bill in this Congress.
Worsening matters for the White House, Obama's political influence is at a low ebb. An underappreciated effect of Obamacare's disastrous roll-out is that congressional Democrats feel betrayed: They took tough votes and lost dozens of seats to pass this law, and then the Obama administration failed to make good on its key political promises ("if you like your health care plan, you can keep it") and failed to implement the legislation effectively, or even vaguely competently.
And then there's Obama's poll numbers, which, according to Quinnipiac, have dropped to a new low. This graph does not improve Obama's pull in Congress:
Politically and substantively, this is a low for the administration. "Things suck right now," says one Senate Democratic aide. "They suck unbelievably much, considering where we were six weeks ago."
The question is whether it's rock bottom. Perhaps soon HealthCare.gov will improve, congressional Democrats will relax, and the narrative will shift to "comeback" mode. In that world, it's even plausible that Republicans could underperform in 2014 and decide to take another look at immigration reform before their standing with Hispanics dooms them in 2016, too.
It's also possible, however, that the Web site will continue to fail, the Obama administration's agenda will continue to flounder, and the damage will simply mount, leading to a disastrous 2014 for Democrats and an early end for the White House's second-term ambitions.
The core fact in all of this is that the Obama administration's fortunes largely lie beyond politics now. They will be decided by the reality of how well their signature law works. Jeff Zients has a big job ahead of him. |
