Where the light of evil pervades, the people suffer life in the deepest darkness.
My first intention was to write on economic theory and I hope to honor fully that intention – next week. I would be remiss if I failed to analyze the past week in American politics. Even though the past two articles have been about America, it may be instructive to again follow the unwinding strands in American politics. If perceptive, you will see clues that might help resolve some of inner mysteries impeding the just development of this political economy.
Two weeks ago, President Obama held trumpet in hand, blowing notes of political triumph. He had finessed hard-line Republicans over the federal government shutdown and the deficit ceiling. Fellow Democrats barely contained their glee; many gloated like a Cheshire cat happening upon a saucer of warm milk. They shouldn’t have grinned and cooed so much. Fate never remains loyal to those who take it for granted. Fate always repudiates those who believe they have so won its full favor. To believe you have mastered fate is to become its next victim. The surest way into a sticky predicament is loudly to boast you have resolved one.
The music of victory was sonorous to Obama and fellow Democrats. Yet, they erred by ceding to the temptation of listening to it. Their séance with fleeting victory deafened them to the footsteps of political calamity at their door. Even if they heard the stalking ogre, they could not have avoided its reproach for they had invited it themselves. They had given it birth. It bore their name: Obamacare.
The initiation of Obamacare has been disastrous. Inexplicably, yesterday’s technology was used to launch the website for the millions of citizens applying for insurance. This was like asking scores of people to walk simultaneously through a narrow portal barely suitable for the passage of one person. The result has been frustrated hugger-mugger. Making matters worse by eagerly snorting profit when more profit stands in poor taste, insurance companies have cancelled policies of tens of thousands, if not millions, of people. The costs of subsequent policies will rise.
Leaked, as well as officially published, government documents reveal the Administration knew these troubles would beset the public. Yet senior officials, including the President himself, publicly dissembled the new law would usher in a period of rainbows and tulips for the sick and uninsured in the land of the free and home of the brave.
Obama and his health officials have been place on the defensive. Their excuses for the law’s technological and substantive defects are limp and unconvincing. There is a sense of unease. It is as if someone everyone thought was an outstanding student failed to complete his homework, not because he forgot the assignment but because he proved incapable of it.
The Republicans have pounced like vultures on carrion. They complain the law went a stride too far; it is too grand a government intrusion into health care which they deem a private matter better left to marketplace. My grouse is the law does not travel far enough. The Republican notion of health care as an ordinary private commercial transaction is inapposite. A person can shop and compare prices among different sellers when purchasing a car, a coat, or leasing a residence. One can negotiate with the sellers. Still, the consumer gets the short end of the stick because the seller almost always has greater leverage.
A sick person does not even have this poor leverage. An ill person can’t venture from hospital to hospital, doctor to doctor comparing who will give appropriate attention at a more modest price. In other transactions, the buyer can threaten to walk from the deal or buy a reduced amount, say 2/3rds, of the goods in question. Yet, few sick people can defy a hospital or a doctor by protesting that costs are too high. Imagine a bleeding man bargaining that they should reduce costs because he has decided he only wants 2/3rds of the complete treatment or that he believes he is only 2/3s as injured as they say. Such a conversation would be nonsensical; it would go far toward convincing the physician that his recalcitrant patient may have a psychiatric ailment more severe than the physical one in question.
The best fix would have been a single-payer system akin to what exists in most other developed nations. Government simply should pay for a decent minimum level of health care for all. Sadly, the Administration tried to assuage vested interests more so than it tried to provide health care for the entire public. The byproduct is a bureaucratic web rich in complexity, lackluster in results. The thing is both fish and fowl yet it may never be able to swim or fly.
For the sake of ordinary Americans and of the president, I hope the plan recovers from this fretful start. If not, the already cumbersome American health care system will become an unintelligible heap. People will suffer. The president’s legacy will be brusquely escorted to the gallows. People will be relieved to return to the old way although that way is a burden unto them. Conservatives will be seen as rescuing the nation from reformer’s folly. The idea of government-led social reform in any context – poverty and economic justice, education, environment – will suffer caustic defeat that progressives will be forced to chew for decades as if trying to eat a plank of hardwood. The aftertaste will be even more acidic because the health care plan was not reform in the truest sense. The plan has many parts and is highly complex but none of the parts was intended to move the process very far. The plan is one of great lateral motion and minimal forward advantage. This is not major reform; it is an elaborate complexity resulting in piecemeal refinement. However, it was labeled reform and the label stuck. Now it is in danger of giving genuine reform an unwanted reputation.
The conservatives now stick hot pokers in this wound, trying to make President Obama wince without respite. They also take him to task on other issues with vengeful eagerness. They are keen to mount a frontal assault on his presidency the likes of which have never been seen. The theme of their attack is slick and vile-hearted attempt to cast a new perception of Obama based on historic racial stereotypes.
The wrongs Obama committed in trying to convince the public that his flawed health plan was nearly perfect have been no worse than the usual hyperbole employed by conventional politicians when promoting their wares. However, the Republican machine casts Obama’s statements as things vitally sinister. They expostulate that his statements demonstrate a singular incompetence or craven dishonesty on a grand scale. In this vein, they have revived their investigation into the Benghazi consulate tragedy. They hope to obtain testimony from mid-level intelligence operatives that the White House left the slain Embassy officials to their saturnine fate. Given that most mid-level operatives are of the highly conservative bent and disdain this president for what they believe his skin color represents, such testimony will likely be forthcoming. Add to this the Administration’s waffling over the revelations of the National Security Agency’s global eavesdropping.
The central theme of conservative attack is becoming pronounced and visible. It is a more subtle racism than that normally deployed but racism all the same.
They claim Obama is incompetent because he pleads ignorance over the details of many of the current policy controversies. They say his lack of knowledge reveals a lack of commitment to the actual gruel and tasks of governance. He lavishes the limelight and knows how to talk sweetly but shies from the pedestrian hard work essential to good governance. In other words, the conservatives paint Obama as a lazy executive with a gift of gab. Thus, he has used his verbal gifts to bamboozle the electorate into buying a fraudulent bill of goods called Obamacare. As such, he is nothing more than an elegant confidence man, a refined street hustler.
This portrait Republicans work at feverish pace to complete. They have the 2014 congressional electoral calendar in mind. In 2014, all House of Representative seats and 1/3 of the Senate are up for election. The Republican grand strategy is not so much to contest and highlight their differences with the Democratic candidates in each individual congressional race. Their plan will be to run against Obama, particularly given the troubles with Obamacare and other policies. However, they will not just run against Obama’s perceived misdeeds. They will cast his errors and omissions as so ominous as to define him as too incompetent to remain in office. The Black man is too lazy, dumb and unfit to finish his term. In all they do, Republicans cast the suggestion of impeachment. Rarely do their strategists meet without impeachment on the menu and in their minds. Increasingly, Republican officeholders publicly raise the prospect.
Removing Obama from office via impeachment is as unlikely an event as a tuxedoed aardvark directing traffic at busy urban intersection. However, reality and logic have little to do with this effort. This is about a mean element called political ambition teamed with an even darker emotion known as hatred. Republicans have a few short- and longer-term goals. They want to maintain control of the House. Incidentally, presidential impeachment proceedings are initiated by the House. The Republican rallying cry for the 2014 elections will be the need to vote for hardliners eager to tar Obama with the brush of impeachment. Impeachment cannot be achieved without the Senate where the Democrats hold a slim majority over the Republicans. A change in two-three seats can make the difference there.
Thus, the Republican political machine will now work overtime to highlight Obama’s personal deficits. They seek to paint him as so reckless and insouciant as to be criminally negligent and unfit for office. They care not that they lack provable legal grounds for the attempt. Racial hatred provides ample political staging for the turbid undertaking. Their objective is not to remove Obama from office. His removal is the pot at the end of the rainbow. If they don’t get the pot, the emotion and fantasy elicited by chasing the rainbow will suffice.
The Republicans want to maintain control of the house. By rousing the hard-line electoral base in this crusade against Obama, they believe they will spur a coalition of arch conservatives, Tea Partiers and fringe racists to the polls that Republicans will maintain their hold on the House. If they perform this task with sufficient aplomb, Republicans may steal one or two Senate slots, changing the partisan balance of power in the upper chamber to their favor. Also, Republicans want to permanently taint Obama as a failure. By embroiling his name in protracted discussion or even the formal initiation of impeachment proceedings, they believe they will forever scar him.
(They tried something similar against President Clinton who actually committed an arguably impeachable offense. The ploy worked in the short-term. Clinton was wounded and disgraced. He was only rehabilitated when the Bush presidency became a fiasco and people started longing for the halcyon decade of the 1990s. Moreover, Clinton is more of a natural politician than Obama and Clinton never had to face the racist undercurrent that stymies Obama’s walk.)
Mainstream media now joins the Republicans in attacking Obama. Several weeks ago, this column predicted the media would launch an increasing stream of opprobrium. Indeed, the lever has been turned. The canal of adverse commentary has opened. Obama-bashing will become the cardinal pastime of many journalists, just a few weeks removed, appeared friendly to his cause.
While the particular facts are unique to America, this situation offers lessons for all. Reform in miniature is always dangerous and rarely works. Lukewarm, minor reformers also are an endangered species as leaders. They get pilloried by those who think they have gone too far and lambasted by those who don’t believe they have ventured far enough. Those who support them do so from pragmatic, short-term self interests. However, such support is never deep or resolute. It wanes with the first sign of rain or strong wind. If problems with Obamacare persist, much of his support will evaporate because it was never fully committed to an overarching political cause or humanitarian effort. His health care constituency was the sloppy cobbling of numerous constituencies many of whose self-interests contradict the interests of other members of this improvised procession.
Obama and his team erred by yielding too much to short-term expedients without gauging the longer-term substantive effects of these steps. Serial compromises whittled down reform until it became a motley stew of stale bromides and not a cohesive plan. Next week, I will do the piece on economic theory as it relates to government fiscal policy. But will offer a bit of a primer now. Obamacare’s core flaw is the malady of the economic theory buttressing this unwieldy construct. Obama and team believed the federal government could become insolvent in dollars. This is no more plausible than belief in the Fountain of Youth. However, this belief is a fountain of folly from which significant ill-advised policies can spring.
Because of this error, Obama and team never felt confident in making a case for serious reform such an expanding government-funded Medicare/Medicaid to all. Believing themselves handcuffed by fiscal constraints, they hamstrung themselves by believing that the current private insurance based system was inviolate. Thus, the alleged reform because a paean to the insurance industry by mandating that everyone purchase insurance instead of mandating that everyone is entitled to health care. These things seem synonymous but are not.
In the end, the Obama Administration constructed a system whereby the insurance companies get higher profits from a higher volume of coerced business. Government will spend comparably the same on health care as before. The public will be forced to spend more on insurance at a moment when the wages of the common man are stagnate and most Americans are worse off now than at the advent of the historic 2008 recession.
In effect, the health care reform is an indirect tax on the people by transferring more money to the insurance companies. The measure effectuates this transfer more so than it expands and improves public health care. In other words, Obamacare needs some critical surgery if it is to work well. That surgery is unlikely in the current environment because the president will be preoccupied with guarding his political flank from nasty Republican assaults. So busy keeping the wolves from his throat, he will not have time for much else in the foreseeable future. Most of this predicament can be distilled to an error in economic theory and how that theory shapes fiscal policy. Next week, we explore how better theory can lead to better policies helping those who really need it.
08060340825 (sms only)
