Liars’ Remorse Democrats have second thoughts about Obamacare
William Voegeli
January 19, 2015, Vol. 20, No. 18
In the Time magazine issue published after the 2008 election—whose cover depicted Barack Obama as Franklin Roosevelt—Peter Beinart anticipated a new “era of liberal hegemony” that would last until “Sasha and Malia have kids.”
President Obama is not yet a grandfather, but his era of liberal hegemony only appears to have lasted months, not decades. Photoshopping gave Obama the pince-nez and cigarette holder that were FDR’s trademarks but could not conjure the startling congressional majorities of the 1930s. The Depression and New Deal left Republicans discredited, irrelevant, and shattered. GOP House and Senate majorities of 62 percent and 58 percent, respectively, after the 1928 election shrank to caucuses of 20 percent and 17 percent after 1936. Under Obama the trajectory has been the opposite: Republicans have gone from 41 percent of the House seats after the 2008 election to 57 percent after 2014 and from 40 senators to 54.
Inevitably, Democrats are trying to figure out why the present that dismays them is so much less congenial than the future they recently anticipated. Some have begun to disparage Obamacare, the incumbent’s most FDR-like achievement. Half of the 60 Democratic senators who voted for the Affordable Care Act in December 2009—the exact number needed to prevent its being filibustered to death, since all Republicans opposed it—are no longer in the Senate. These ex-senators include eight who were defeated by Republicans, and eight more who chose not to run again and were succeeded by Republicans.
One of the latter, Tom Harkin of Iowa, recently told a reporter, “I look back and say we should have either done [health care reform] the correct way or not done anything at all.” Charles Schumer of New York, in the remnant of Democrats whose Senate careers have survived Obamacare, voiced similar sentiments in a National Press Club speech three weeks after the 2014 elections. “Democrats blew the opportunity the American people gave them” in 2008, Schumer said. “We took their mandate and put all of our focus on the wrong problem—health care reform.” Arguing that 85 percent of Americans had health insurance they were satisfied with when Democrats took power in 2009, and few of the uninsured voted at all, much less on the basis of health policy, Schumer contended, “To aim a huge change in mandate at such a small percentage of the electorate made no political sense.”
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Source URL: weeklystandard.com |
