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Obama's job was to sell health care reform to American voters. He failed.
Mickey Kaus, "kausfiles.com" @ SlateGlenn Reynolds' sensible account of the Tea Party movement notes that it is largely blogger-powered. My colleague Bob Wright would agree, but finds this technological development ominous. I dunno. Wright calls tea-partiers "Special Interest 3.0." But they look like people to me. Sure, they are not the majority--in that sense they are "special." But they are not "special" in that they seem to be representing their holistic interest as American citizens, not their partial identities as seniors, or union members, or veterans or employees of corporations. ... Of course it would be easier to pass health care reform if all you had to do was cut a deal with labor unions and insurance companies and PhRMA--the o.g. lobbies of "Special Interest 1.0"--while ignoring the mass of individual voters. But you have to really contort yourself to think the replacement of narrow, economic interests with broader citizen interests is some sort of tragic turn of events. For decades good government types have been attempting to summon broad popular interests in order to defeat narrow economic interests. Now that it's happening they're having second thoughts (because they don't like the first result). ... Alternative theory: We got all the reforms we could get through old-fashioned interest group bargaining. The big reforms that have yet to be done are the ones that can't be accomplished that way. Empowering voters might ultimately be one way to achieve them. ... Anyway, in the "good old days" of elite corporatist dealmaking you still would probably have trouble passing a giant piece of legislation that was 10 points underwater in terms of popularity. We had democracy even in 1950. ... P.S.: Lots of intellectual effort now seems to be going into explaining Obama's (possible/likely/impending) health care failure as the inevitable product of larger historic and constitutional forces. There's something to this of course--the Framers went overboard in making it hard for the government to act, for example. But in this case there's a simpler explanation: Barack Obama's job was to sell a health care reform plan to American voters. He failed. He didn't fail because 55% of Americans can never be convinced of anything. It happens all the time. He just failed. . . . That's not constitutional paralysis or Web-enabled mob rule. It's just bad salesmanship. . . . Posted by: Mike 2010-02-15 |
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