You did say before that to think that the Republicans won because of ebola was wrong, and yet what Schumer describes is precisely what the narrative was for the Republicans, The Ebola response, like the health care roll out was resolved and without the need of canceling the whole thing. And so it was with many other issues based on misleading information given to a lot of the American public by reactionary media.
On this I do think that Nancy Pelosy hits it in the nail: “We come here to do a job, not keep a job. There are more than 14 million reasons why [What Shumer said about Health care] that’s wrong,”
Also, another thing; Clinton, GHWB and Reagan were all recent presidents and all had larger Electoral College % margins of victory as non-incumbents than Obama, meaning that, even **among the 5 most recent presidencies, Obama actually had the 2nd-lowest EV ** margin of victory as a non-incumbent candidate.
Schumer is really, really wrong in this case. Health care was way, way worth it, and there’s little chance it would have gotten done with a Republican Congress. It was definitely the right move for the country. The ACA, even with its many problems, improved America more than any other single bill in decades.
I do remember being satisfied too, until I lost a job that offered me health care.
In any case, just like when it was said that “We lost the south” there are times that doing the right thing does lead the ones making the change to suffer the manufactured consequences by the ones that opposed the change thanks to misinformation and ideology.
Having experience doesn’t guarantee success, especially when your experience shows you to be mediocre at best. Bush’s performance in Texas reliably predicted his performance as President.
Lack of experience almost guarantees failure. No person can come into so much as a McDonalds without management experience and do well right away. And many never become good at even so much as that, yet you don’t find out until you’ve had them try. That’s why governors are better than Senators. Governor and President are equivalent jobs, President is just running a bigger operation. Senator and President are completely different jobs, as related as plumbing and baseball.
It depends on what your goals were. If you wanted to create permanent change, moving the country to the left, then ACA was the top priority. And the President said that transformational change was his top priority, he wanted to be the Democratic Reagan.
But that’s not how everyone sees democracy. I see it as balancing the desires of the electorate with the good of the country. As a general rule, you shouldn’t do stuff that the electorate really doesn’t want, especially when they elected you to do something else. That’s Schumer’s position. They were elected to fix the economy and they were instead focused on other things. It was as if the leadership said, “We’re in a recession! What a great time to enact our normal platform!” Which of course they would have said if the economy was booming too. It’s always the right time to do what Democrats normally want to do, apparently.
Sez who? If is is too complicated to walk and chew gum at the same time, take a step, chew, take another step, chew, so on and so forth.
What they clearly should have done is cut taxes. Recession? Cut taxes. Depression? Cut taxes, but especially for the job creators. Neuritis, neuralgia, the heartbreak of psoriasis? Oh, you better *believe *that’s a tax cutting!
What they should have done was the JOBS Act right after the stimulus, rather than making it something they “pivoted” to after losing an election.
They didn’t learn from their own history. FDR didn’t create a single entitlement until his second term. For his first four years they produced nothing but economic reforms and financial reforms. THey were completely focused on fighting the Depression. Despite such a terrible depression, and despite many missteps on the path to remedying the depression, the voters rewarded the Democrats overwhelmingly. Because the voters felt the Democrats were focused on their needs.
If the Democrats had said, “Hey, let’s create a universal health care system!” in 1933 the story would have been very different.
In 1933, healthcare was not the severe drag on the economy that has become over the past two+ decades. And the economy was in a much worse long-term condition, having been messed up badly for nearly four years due to the effects of capitalistic “fixes”. In '09, important steps had already been taken to stabilize the financial markets, at least over the short term (the banksters are at their tricks again and will probably tank things again sometime in the next few years), and the “stimulus” had been put into place. Tackling healthcare reform made as much sense as anything else at the time, howsoever ham-handedly they carried it forth.
Because, you see, the problems with the system began forming in the mid-to-late '40s, when insurance companies got some sweet deregulation, medicine became more complex, and, later, as workers became increasingly shatten upon. It was a serious issue, and, sadly, still is (unless you were/are a Republican or Tea-creature).
That’s a reasonable argument for doing health care reform, and there were other reasonable arguments made for why health care reform was part of fighting the recession. Mostly made by rather intelligent bloggers and discussion board posters. And therein lies the problem.
The administration and Democrats in Congress made almost no attempt to sell what they were doing. Instead, they attempted to rush it through, got stopped cold, and then started defending against Republican attacks on the bill rather than making an affirmative defense of it. They never even came close to telling Americans why 2009 was the appropriate time to do health care reform.
You cannot do big things in this country without first doing what the Bush team used to call “product rollout”. They were dumb about a lot of things, but they knew product rollout. The Democrats lost that skill sometime after LBJ. Now they just do things and expect the public to accept them because it’s just so obvious. Who could oppose health care?
Then there’s the fact that they really weren’t doing health care because of the recession, so such arguments would have been arguments of convenience in any case. The argument among Democrats wasn’t whether to do health care or jobs, it was whether to do health care, climate change, or immigration. In hindsight, health care was probably the least stupid of the three priorities.
The Democrats also told lies, and those lies ended up being more damaging since the law actually passed and people had to live with the consequences of those lies.
Much like the Iraq war, all the Democratic predictions that didn’t come true never came back to bite them because what really mattered is that the REpublican lies used to sell the war were the real issue. When you get your preferred policy option, the focus is naturally on what YOU said to sell it, not what your opponents said in an attempt to defeat it.
Not intended to be comparable. WAr is a bigger deal than a social program. But let’s not minimize it to the point where it doesn’t matter. Both cases are serious enough that lying to sell them has serious consequences for public support.
In many ways, the Obama administration has been just like the Bush administration just not quite as catastrophic. Call Obama a “poor man’s Bush”.
To me, this is just bad punditry. Health care has been nearly the holy grail for liberal politics for decades – and we got it, if not in a perfect way. That’s the opposite of a catastrophe, even if it’s not very popular right now.
