Let’s put this ongoing series of White House-related missteps and flat-out fiascos into reasonable perspective.
We’ve been disappointed. Frustratingly, embarrassingly so.
But how many of us wax nostalgic for the regime-change foreign policy and financial negligence of the Bush-Rumsfeld-Cheney years? And would we actually prefer that we were near the end of the first year of the second term of President John McCain?
Remember that on foreign policy McCain still thought Vietnam was a good idea and conceded that “the economy wasn’t exactly” his “strong point.” Recall that Palin was an alarmingly under-informed, Tea Party-celeb opportunist. But, ironically, imagine the GOPster hosannas that would have been elicited for an administration that had more than doubled the stock market and killed off a bunch of national-security enemies.
Having said that, however, let’s be honest. The Obama Administration has turned into the Amateur Hour.
The Affordable Care Act rollout is literal Saturday Night Live material. Fair or not, the debacle buck stops in the Oval Office, whether it’s the NSA snooping on Angela Merkel, the State Department soft shoeing on Benghazi or the IRS curiously singling out audit targets. We either have a president who made bad calls or one who has plausible deniability, which sounds hauntingly Nixonesque.
Maybe the tea leaves were there for the reading when the newly-elected president turned presumed pragmatic compromise into a sense of impending weakness with health care overhaul. Single payer was the obvious way to go–but that went nowhere when the White House abdicated to Congress for counterproductive, business-as-usual “buy-in.” The subplot-laden, insurance-marketplace hybrid resulted.
No surprise, ultimately, that in the aftermath of multiple assault-weapon tragedies, there was not enough leadership to effectuate even minimally acceptable, gun-control laws. The Tea Partiers may be an agenda-driven, crazed gaggle of ideological simpletons, but they were doubtless egged on toward fiscal cliffs, sequestrations and government shutdowns by the perception of a president they deemed assailable.
What really hurts with the botched ACA rollout is that it makes it easier for the opposition, including birthers, racists and those who pine for the Articles of Confederation, to defame the ACA, per se. And it certainly didn’t help that among those labeling the ACA “Obamacare” was President Obama. Why make it easier for the demonizers?
If there’s anything the Obama Administration couldn’t afford to do, it was to make a law of the land a lot easier to deride and to inspire efforts to undermine it. The result, after website hell: a compromised brand and the derailment of expected, out-of-the-blocks momentum.
It’s also reintroduced “death panels” and “socialized medicine” back into the rhetorical fray. Ironically, the former might actually apply to those among the 40 million uninsured who haven’t been able to get coverage because of “previously existing conditions.” As for the latter, that’s what results when the rest of us subsidize the uninsured who regularly avail themselves of emergency room treatment.
That’s a reality overshadowed in the wincing context of Kathleen Sebelius’ mea culpa congressional testimony. Also, lost in translation: The ACA is the most notable effort in memory to provide health care to millions of uninsured Americans. That hurts. Especially, the self-inflicted obstacles to implementation.
But, yes, it could be a lot worse.