The budget deal, whatever it is, has four legs, a collar, and lots of fleas. How did we fall so far so fast?
Democrats have to be asking ourselves why each of the last three Democratic presidencies have followed such a similar pattern—high expectations, followed by a severe drop-off in public support. Jimmy Carter infuriated liberal Democrats by moving to the right. Bill Clinton and Obama pushed a liberal agenda and got pummeled in the mid-terms. Doesn’t anybody like us any more?
The great liberal setpiece for the past twenty years has been universal health care. Yet I don’t claim any special prescience in believing, way back in 1992, that a program that met the health needs of the great majority of Americans was not in crying need of major reform. Expanding the existing system to include everyone was going to cost more—a lot more—and the only major complaint people had with the existing system was that it cost too much already.
Obama thought to thread the needle by expanding the system and cutting costs at the same time. Like Jimmy Carter, he had an unbounded faith in the power of rationality to concoct a “best system.” But people don’t want to be told that, for example, rationalizing the scheduling of mammary exams will reduce false positives by 7 percent, freeing up tens of billions of dollars in resources that can used to reduce mortality rates for other diseases, while increasing the rate of false negatives by only .04 percent, and actual deaths by .008 percent. Point zero zero eight percent! Not good enough! We want zero false positives and zero false negatives! This is America! We want it all!
Obama is caught in the furious undertow that is the reaction to all the bailouts and stimuli that, in my opinion, saved the world from a second Great Depression. But by daring to cure the Great Depression, he now owns the Great Recession. To a dangerous extent, Obama sold his soul to Wall Street, taking on Tim Geithner as Secretary of the Treasury, a man who surely has sold his soul to Wall Street. The idea was that Obama would protect Wall Street from the crazies, and vice versa, but the Street, as is its wont, is welshing* on the deal. Obama who? Wasn’t he the guy who was going to raise our taxes? I like these Republicans! They’re so friendly!
*SpellCheck can’t spell “welsh”. What is the deal with that?
