In Obama’s otherwise praiseworthy speech to schoolchildren, there were some tell-tale “gag-phrases,” as Mickey Kaus points out. Kaus writes: “He has two wars and a health care bill to worry about, and a whole lot of other politicians and bureaucrats whose job it is to refurbish up school facilities. Is he Superman? Obama’s willingness to cut out all the other players does suggest an unattractive solipsism and egotism at best and . . . a troublesome cult-building instinct well, let’s just leave it at that.” Indeed.
You don’t think it has anything to do with health-care reform, do you? “The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey shows that 44% would vote for their district’s Republican congressional candidate while 37% would opt for his or her Democratic opponent. Support for both parties rose one point over the past week, giving Republicans their highest level of support of the past several years. Support for Democrats last week reached its lowest point during that same time period.”
Maybe Olympia Snowe isn’t as malleable on the public option as the mainstream media and the ObamaCare supporters (I repeat myself) are making her out to be.
The Washington Post‘s editors implore Obama to throw the public option under the bus. And they seem awfully peeved that Obama is throwing a lot of money away: “Having inherited an economy in a tailspin, Mr. Obama backed a $787 billion stimulus package, helping to set the country on a path toward deficits on a scale not seen in half a century. At that stage he might have caught his breath and decided to put the nation on a sounder long-term fiscal footing. Instead, he chose to double down with a new commitment of $1 trillion over 10 years, promising to address the overall national deficit comprehensively only after Congress approves this new health-care entitlement.”
Camille Paglia is on fire again (still?) about Obama’s incompetence and big-government obsession: “By foolishly trying to reduce all objections to healthcare reform to the malevolence of obstructionist Republicans, Democrats have managed to destroy the national coalition that elected Obama and that is unlikely to be repaired. If Obama fails to win reelection, let the blame be first laid at the door of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, who at a pivotal point threw gasoline on the flames by comparing angry American citizens to Nazis. It is theoretically possible that Obama could turn the situation around with a strong speech on healthcare to Congress this week, but after a summer of grisly hemorrhaging, too much damage has been done.”
Sarah Palin has a compelling column on the dangers of ObamaCare, arguing against those “death panels” (the Medicare Advisory Council) and warning against the mammoth increase in federal spending. She instead argues for a conservative health-care reform: “As the Cato Institute’s Michael Cannon and others have argued, such policies include giving all individuals the same tax benefits received by those who get coverage through their employers; providing Medicare recipients with vouchers that allow them to purchase their own coverage; reforming tort laws to potentially save billions each year in wasteful spending; and changing costly state regulations to allow people to buy insurance across state lines. Rather than another top-down government plan, let’s give Americans control over their own health care.” Okay, conservative pundit naysayers, what’s wrong with that?
Cap-and-trade, James Pethokoukis argues, is in trouble for the same three reasons health care is — a phony crisis, no immediate benefit, and lack of relevance (the real issue now is unemployment). The fourth, and most important, however, is the most obvious: voters don’t want government acquiring that much power over the economy and their lives.
Michael Gerson argues that Obama is off-topic: “America has an ongoing crisis — an economic crisis of rising unemployment and negative economic growth. Obama clearly believed the economic emergency would give him the opportunity to do anything on the progressive agenda that he wished. Actually, it gave him the burden to do one thing well: respond to the economic emergency. Insofar as health reform is seen as complicating this task — particularly by the addition of massive, inflationary debt — the narrative of crisis will continue to work against Obama instead of for him.”
