President Barack Obama is trading in his only bargaining chip in the health care debate, but there’s no reason to expect that it will change the game.
The White House has climbed down in stutter steps from Obama’s support for a new government-run insurance program. It was once the only thing that we knew the president supported.
That’s at least one health care myth dispelled, I suppose.
Obama was wise to hold on to the public option for as long as he could, though.
Dropping the idea makes liberals see red. They know that the fastest way to get to a single-payer, European-style system is to start with a public plan. So does Obama.
But the idea never had a chance in the Senate. After six months of trying to keep the concept viable, the White House is admitting what the old bulls of the Senate knew on day one.
It’s too expensive and too socialist for the USA. You can have universal coverage for 9 million healthy, wealthy, civic-minded Swedes. Doing so in a country of 310 million doughnut-munching, upward-striving, liberty-loving Americans of every race and creed spread from Miami to Juneau is a non-starter.
So now, with a little help from the Kennedy clan, the president will hope to get the liberal wing of his party to accept that reality.
When his friend Caroline Kennedy heads out to Pittsburgh later this month to address the AFL-CIO, you can expect that her message will be that her late Uncle Ted would have wanted them to accept half a loaf rather than let Republicans defeat health care reform.
The old-school unions have been getting pretty thoroughly shafted in the Obama era — their jobs keep leaving but new organizing rules — remember “card check”? — keep getting pushed off into Tomorrowland. So Kennedy’s Brearley School manners won’t be sufficient to win over aggrieved steel workers and coal miners.
The contents of the half-loaf she’s selling will really matter. And they will also matter for the president when he eventually tells the American people what he wants.
For now, the White House is still thinking about atmospherics with his decision to make another address to a joint session of Congress.
But that part doesn’t matter very much. Obama has become the pervasive presence of our time. If he were to give the remarks from a rodeo ring or while skydiving out of a blimp, it might register. But if he preempts the season premier of “Criminal Minds” for more talk about health care, he won’t succeed on optics. He’ll need a real message.
A president who is trying to cling to a 50 percent job approval rating and with the bottom dropping out of his major foreign policy initiative doesn’t turn things around because of talk. Action is what’s required.
But which one?
The likely answer is a federal law requiring all Americans to have health insurance. And like a public defense attorney, if you cannot afford it, insurance will be provided for you.
If you can afford it and don’t buy it, you’ll be fined and the money will go to cover the poor folks. Or for a high-speed train to Las Vegas. Whatever.
If the mandatory coverage comes with heavy insurance regulations, it might be a perfect Obama-style victory. Big government and big business both win. The feds take over health care through the back door and the biggest insurance companies get lots of new customers and rules that prevent competition. It would be like old-fashioned public utilities, and with equally responsive customer service.
The president may get the House on board if he can convince the Left that dastardly Republicans and their army of grandmas forced him to give up the public option but that he found another path to single-payer paradise.
But the Senate is another matter.
The threat of reconciliation has always been hollow. The majority leader is getting ready to take a beating in Nevada next year, and moderate members are unlikely to accept Rahm Emanuel’s suggestion to turn the Democratic Senate Caucus into a political suicide pact.
That means 60 votes will be needed to pass a national mandate. Assuming Robert Byrd can make it to the floor and the least-dissipated Kennedy has been installed in the family seat, the Dems will need a few Republicans because of Democratic defectors.
With 12 days left before the Senate runs smack into the deadline for a bipartisan accord, how likely does that seem?
Chris Stirewalt is the political editor of The Washington Examiner. He can be reached at [email protected].
