Maybe you should step back and think for a moment. Did they really support “insurance for all”? How many times during the campaign did the establishment types scream “great idea” at Trump pronouncements?
Sure, there should be political consequences for “playing ball” with the President’s campaign promises and his actions since but there’s no good reason for ignoring the times people didn’t. Trump barely got a inkling of support when he said “We won’t get people die on the street” .
Accepting what politicians say at face value doesn’t seem like a useful approach towards political analysis.
The typical Republican constituent doesn’t want their own insurance taken away. They only want health insurance taken away from everyone else. Especially poor people, brown people, and anyone who talks in a funny accent or prays to a God that’s not nailed to a cross. The GOP fed right into this prejudice by promising the sky when they knew they could do nothing about it but make baseless promises. Now the jig is up, and their voters are suddenly realizing, “Wait, if we repeal Obamacare does that mean I lose MY ACA too? That’s not fair! Whaaa!!”
That’s why there’s been so much discussion about making separate tax brackets for healthcare, with people living so-called “healthy lifestyles” promised that they’ll pay less in premiums unlike those sickly unwashed poor, brown people. The irony, of course, is that your typical Republican probably has more health issues on average, due to age & obesity and other factors, than the health-conscious veggie-eating liberals. But you know they’ll find some way to turn that on its head as well, if only for propaganda’s sake. Hell, it took the GOP less than a year to get everyone calling the conflict in Iraq & Afghanistan “Obama’s War.”
Totally called it. (12/20/16)
Wow. Is that what we’ve become? Trump promises cheaper and simpler universal coverage and lots of people vote for him, probably because ACA didn’t seem cheap, universal, or simple. But now that it’s clear he doesn’t give a shit, we should just ignore what he promised and engage some “political analysis” instead?
One of the reasons Congress is struggling to get ACA repealed is that they have to do so with the backdrop of Trump’s campaign (and post-campaign) promises.
Politician promises things they can’t deliver is not a novel occurrence that began with Trump. Are you saying that “we’ve become” this since Trump, and that before that taking politicians at face value was valuable?
Rarely funny?
Anyhoo, I can’t say if I possess more raw intelligence than Ryan and McConnell, but I’m pretty sure the intelligence I have is less blinkered by ideology and/or less beholden to corporate interests among my constituents.
And I can’t imagine saying Trump is brainless is even among the hundred worst insults he’ll get on this board today. Or indeed any day of the last year or so, or indeed the next three years, assuming he doesn’t die in that time leading to some restraint being felt about speaking ill of the dead.
It may have been relatively rare in American history for a candidate to make such obviously grandiose and implausible promises, and have his voters divided between:
A) people who actually believe it is possible to cut taxes, spend more on the military, build a wall along the entire Mexican border, restore full coal production, give all Americans affordable non-ACA health insurance and balance the budget; and
B) people who knew some or all of this was absurd, but voted for him anyway just to shake things up.
Making promises they can’t deliver is indeed old news. But you saying the promises are, in essence, irrelevant is what shocked me.
Taking their promises at “face value” is similar to “holding them accountable.”
Did Trump make a promise that he “can’t deliver,” or did his just say something he thought would get him votes or support, with no intention of even trying to deliver?
Has Trump proposed a Health Care Plan yet? (remember, he was days away from disclosing it last January)
It’s like having a secret plan to end the Vietnam War.
I expect politicians to lie which means I don’t get disappointed often, and sometimes pleasantly surprised.
The comparison to Newt Gingrich’s “Contract with America” is instructive. That was a list of things they’d ram through in the first 100 days. And they did.
But the difference is that they focus grouped the stuff on that list and it was all stuff that was broadly popular. Remove some congressional perks? Hell yes. Make raising taxes harder, eliminate the marriage penalty, get tougher on crime? Hell yes.
So even though not everything was implemented, Republicans in Congress had absolutely no problem proudly voting for all this stuff, and it was all very specific stuff with the language already drafted.
Compare and contrast to “Repeal and replace Obamacare”. “Repeal Obamacare” at least is specific. But the stuff you’d have to repeal, like protection for preexisting conditions, is also very popular. And they had absolutely, and I mean absolutely, no actual “Replace” plan.
So all they really could have done right away was “Repeal now and replace later, and by later we mean much later. No, later than that.” And given Trump’s “It’s gonna be cheaper and better and cover everyone” they couldn’t quite bring themselves to pull the trigger on “Repeal and don’t replace”. Maybe Trump would have signed it? How would it look for Trump to veto Obamacare repeal? There was actually a belief at the time, hard to believe now in these far future months, that Trump was going to keep his popularity up by opposing the Republican Establishment and following through–at least in public–with his populist rhetoric.
So they were, at first, very reluctant to pass “Repeal but don’t replace”. In retrospect that’s probably what they should have done, if they really wanted to cram this down the throats of the public and deal with the consequences later.
Saying you have a “secret plan” to end the Vietnam War (when you don’t) is a pretty major black mark on your character. And it doesn’t say much for voters who fall for it.
You really wouldn’t be critical of a candidate that promised to make “changes” that would raise medium US income to $250,000 within 2 years? Or one that promised an “easy” plan for universal health care that would lower premiums?
Would I be critical? Maybe, but only to the extent that such a promise is ludicrous. It would be like promising that cold fusion is right around the corner - great if possible but highly unlikely. That’s not a serious promise so failure to meet it is not a surprise. So my criticism would be less about saying, ‘you promised therefore I’m upset you didn’t fulfill your promise’ and more about ‘why would you take that seriously?’
But, as far as I can tell, a whole bunch of angry Americans did take the TrumpCare promises seriously. Granted, probably not Ryan and McConnell. Should they have said at the time that it was all B.S. and a fantasy of a deluded mind? Probably. Their willingness to turn a blind eye to the madness won’t help them when the history of this period is written.
I would question whether people did take those promises seriously. By seriously, I mean enough to alter behavior. Because it looks like voting patterns were fairly consistent and at the margins you have some people that may be deciding on the issues. But by and large a pretty significant group of both sides would vote the party regardless of any promises or lack thereof. In 2008, McCain got nearly the same vote amounts in gross numbers and in % that Trump did, and he wasn’t running on repeal/replace.
How do you measure how seriously 2016 voters took the repeal/replace promises?
I don’t know. But the ACA seemed like a big issue and Trump promised an easy fix that would make it better for everyone. On the other hand, he promised a lot of easy fixes, so it’s hard to say what exactly motivated otherwise sane people to vote for him.
I was one of the people who thought they’d “repeal & replace” or at least “repeal” in early February.
At the time, I’d heard rumors of 3 or 4 plans that were being discussed in some fashion or other (e.g., the Sessions-Cassidy bill or even the one that Obama vetoed in January 2016) . I’d assumed that the Republicans would pick up one of those, coalesce around it and ram it through. Also, while I didn’t think that Trump knew a damn thing about health care, I’d assumed that someone in his circle had a pet theory or plan that the WH would send to Congress.
As Republicans tend to “fall in line,” I didn’t realize how far apart the moderates and the tea party really were (especially since they’d all been running on jettisoning the ACA.) And so, it was a surprise to me that they had such trouble getting something (anything) through the House. I also didn’t expect this much chaos in the Executive branch.
Please show me where I asserted the leopard wouldn’t pounce.
I don’t know that it is the moderates vs. the tea party, mostly because there are no moderate Republicans anymore. They were called RINOs and driven out by the far right.
You’ve got the Randians (as in Ayn Rand) like Paul Ryan who don’t care if people die as long as they can get through their ‘personal responsibility’ (read: Fuck you, take care of yourself, loser!) philosophy enshrined as law, the Kochheads who don’t want the government involved in anything, the Do Nothings whose only vision is stopping anything from actually happening and who else?
So while the Republicans may hold a majority, their insistence on ZERO COMPROMISE and not working with Democrats means that they can’t pass any major legislation without getting all of their factions on the same page. Since they can’t do that with Health Care, nothing is going to happen until they find some bizzaro ‘middle ground’ that slashes taxes (always a Republican goal), guts Obama’s legacy (Trump’s only goal) and cuts government regulations (another Republican goal) while only vaguely resembling a “Health Care” bill.
Which would be fine, if they hadn’t campaigned on a combination of criticisms about Obamacare which they had no intention of fixing and promises about what healthcare would look like that they had no intention of keeping.
Seems like a great way to utterly abandon accountability for politicians who make crazy promises. And given that the vast majority of Trump’s campaign was made up of crazy promises…
This would be an interesting take were it not for the countless people who took Trump seriously (and literally). How do you deal with that? Sure, you were sophisticated enough to figure out that most of what Trump was promising was insane bullshit (and, if I recall correctly, voted for him anyways), but a lot of his voters weren’t. The fuck do you do about that?
Deal with it, I guess. As George Carlin said, “Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.”