Noonan: Obama/Healthcare’s “risk of catastrophic victory”
In the Wall Street Journal yesterday, spotlighted on Drudge, columnist Peggy Noonan wrote…
Passage of the health-care bill will be, for the administration, a catastrophic victory.
If it is voted through in time for the State of the Union Address, as President Obama hopes, half the chamber will rise to their feet and cheer. They will be cheering their own demise.
If health care does not pass, it will also be a disaster, but only for the administration, not the country. Critics will say, “You didn’t even waste our time successfully.”
What a blunder this thing has been, win or lose, what a miscalculation on the part of the president….
The administration misjudged the mood and the moment. Mr. Obama ran, won, was sworn in and began his work under the spirit of 2008 – expansive, part dreamy and part hubristic. But as soon as he was inaugurated ,the president ran into the spirit of 2009 – more dug in, more anxious, more bottom-line – and didn’t notice. At the exact moment the public was announcing it worried about jobs first and debt and deficits second, the administration decided to devote its first year to health care, which no one was talking about. The great recession changed everything, but not right away….
The public in 2009 would have been happy to see a simple bill that mandated insurance companies offer coverage without respect to previous medical conditions. The administration could have had that – and the victory of it – last winter.
Instead, they were greedy for glory.
It was not worth it – not worth the town-hall uprisings and the bleeding of centrist support, not worth the rebranding of the president from center-left leader to leftist leader, not worth the proof it provided that the public’s concerns and the administration’s are not the same, not worth a wasted 1st year that should have been given to 2 things and 2 things only: economic matters and national security….
Just as bad, or worse, the president’s focus on health care allowed the public to infer that his mind was not focused on our security. He’d frittered his attention on issues that were secondary and tertiary – climate change, health care – while al Qaeda moved, and the system stuttered. A lack of focus breeds bureaucratic complacency, complacency gives rise to slovenliness, slovenliness results in what was said in the report issued Thursday: that, faced with clear evidence of coming danger, the government failed, as they’re saying on TV, to “connect the dots.” Dots? They were boulders….
If Mr. Obama is extremely lucky – and we’re not sure he’s a lucky man anymore – he will get a Republican Congress in 2010, and they will do for him what Newt Gingrich did for Bill Clinton: right his ship, give him a foil, guide him while allowing him to look as if he’s resisting, bend him while allowing him to look strong….
Which gets us to the Republicans. The question isn’t whether they’ll win seats in the House and Senate this year, and the question isn’t even how many. The question is whether the party will be worthy of victory, whether it learned from its losses in 2006 and ’08, whether it deserves leadership. Whether Republicans are a worthy alternative. Whether, in short, they are serious….
Republican political professionals in Washington assume a coming victory. They do not see that 2010 could be a catastrophic victory for them. If they seize back power without clear purpose, if they are not serious, if they do the lazy and cynical thing by just sitting back and letting the Democrats lose, 3 bad things will happen. They will contribute to the air of cynicism in which our citizens marinate. Their lack of seriousness will be discerned by the Republican base, whose enthusiasm and generosity will be blunted. And the Republicans themselves will be left unable to lead when their time comes, because operating cynically will allow the public to view them cynically, which will lessen the chance they will be able to do anything constructive.
In this sense, the cynical view – we can sit back and wait – is naive. The idealistic view – we must stand for things and move on them now – is shrewder.
Political professionals are pugilistic, and often see politics in terms of fight movies: Rocky, Raging Bull. They should be thinking now of a different one, of Tom Hanks at the end of Saving Private Ryan. “Earn this,” he said to the man whose life he’d helped save.
Earn this. Be worthy of it. Be serious.
Jill Stanek is a nurse turned speaker, columnist and blogger, a national figure in the effort to protect both preborn and postborn innocent human life.
Nice piece.
This bill is solely for Obama’s glory. I wish I could understand why so many Democrats are ready to jump off the cliff for his glory.
But I could never understand why Germans would so willingly follow a deranged Austrian to their own destruction.
I generally agree with Noonan, except for the comment that Obama misjudged the mood and the moment.
He didn’t misjudge it, he seized upon the disaffection to ram home his radical remake of America before the electorate woke up and realized what happened.
It’s never been about our wishes. It’s been about realizing his twisted ideology.
we need single payer to save our economy and businesses, large and small. Our firm could pay an additional $1000 tax per employee every month to fund universal health care and save a significant amount of money. So could GM, etc. CBO says this Bill will save billions of dollars for the federal government. I’m actually not in favor of the current Senate version, but the people mostly (1) want this law, or (2) want a more comprehensive law.
“A lack of focus breeds bureaucratic complacency, complacency gives rise to slovenliness, slovenliness results in what was said in the report issued Thursday: that, faced with clear evidence of coming danger, the government failed, as they’re saying on TV, to “connect the dots.” Dots? They were boulders….”
Great line by Ms. Noonan.
Hal,
Horse puckey. This health care “crisis” could be better resolved with more across state line competition among insurance companies and free market forces. The gov’t is good for one thing, and that’s screwing things up.
BTW, one hospital stay or surgical procedure may well cost less than a new car and considerably less than a new home. So when does the gov’t step in. Oh it has, we do have Government Motors do we not?
72% of the people do NOT want tax payer funded abortion.
But “people mostly” want this government takeover of healthcare, right Hal?
This is a fantastic piece by Noonan. Love her last paragraph, and I sure hope the Republicans are listening. They’d better not screw this up. Now’s the moment to get serious, be the alternative to Obama’s immoral idiocy and actually be public servants.
I enjoyed this article. Noonan is a smart gal – even saw right through the joke that Sarah Palin was.
Mary – I hope you just drank too much before that post. There’s a big difference between killing people in war and trying to provide healthcare to more people in a cheaper fashion. While there are many things to fight about in the bill – the cause is still a just one and a good one, and to compare that to Hitler is about as screwed up of a viewpoint as I’ve seen on this board.
Gerard – I could post the popular vote from the last election. It was ugly. And people knew health care was a massive part of the puzzle. Not sure your age, but I’m around 30-somethings all day long, and the support of reform is out there. Again, not every part of it, but reform is desperately needed.
I loved the piece though. The GOP could pick up a solid 5 seats in the senate if they play their cards right – but right now we all know what they are against, but I don’t think anybody could tell me what the GOP is actually for these days.
As Ronald Reagan was reputed to have said, government is like a baby. It is an alimentary canal with a big appetite and lots of noise at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other. The only difference between a baby and this “health care” (government expansion) bill is that the latter is better off aborted.
Hal,
Did you say your firm could save money by paying more taxes? If companies save money and government is making money then whose taing the shaft on this health “reform”?