Joel Benenson, President Obama’s pollster, thinks Obamacare will gain new public support in the months ahead as the public discovers all of the “benefits” the program will provide them.
Writing in The Washington Post over the weekend, Beneson put it this way:
“When it comes to health care and insurance, once reform passes, the tangible benefits Americans will realize will trump the fear-mongering rhetoric opponents are stoking today,” Benenson wrote.
As that process gets going, Benenson said, the political calculations of Democrats and Republicans for the 2010 mid-term congressional elections will change dramatically:
“And when that reality kicks in, the political burden will shift from those who supported the plan to those who voted against banning insurance companies from denying coverage to those who are sick, against the tax credits for small businesses offering coverage, or against helping seniors on Medicare pay less for prescription drugs.”
Benenson is only one of many prominent national Democrats making similar predictions. It’s almost as if they are whistling in the dark to reassure themselves that everything really is going to be all right. The problem is that it’s not going to be all right for them and it’s entirely their own fault.
When it comes to health care reform and the Middle American Rebellion, such conventional thinking by Benenson and other Democrats is especially likely to prove inadequate. On this issue and in the second year of the Obama Era, odds are good that the truth will prove to be quite the opposite of the conventional wisdom.
Here’s why: A constant feature of the health care debate from its beginning last summer has been that as people learned more details about what was being proposed, and as the discussion moved from lofty generalities to hard, cold specifics, support for the government takeover of health care steadily declined.
There is absolutely no reason to think that progression will magically disapear or even be arrested just because Congress finally passed and the president signed into law the Senate version of Obamacare.
If anything, the fact is that the coming months will likely see a series of worrisome new revelations about what is in the law, especially as, to quote House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, it had to be passed before we could “see what’s in it.” Those revelations will reinforce and quite possibly magnify the intensity of the public’s opposition.
Democratic strategists like Benenson assume that knowing more about the alleged benefits of Obamacare will instead soften opposition and even turn the tide of public opinion back toward support.
But that logic doesn’t square with one of the tactical realities Democrats had to cope with in writing Obamacare – most of the “benefits” Democrats want people to ponder now don’t begin for several years, whereas many of the taxes and levies required to fund it, even if only partially, kick in beforehand.
For example, widespread coverage that is supposed to happen via the insurance exchanges won’t start until 2014. That’s also the year when insurance companies will first be barred from denying coverage for pre-existing conditions and the year when Medicaid coverage expands to Americans with up to 133 percent of the federal poverty income level.
But how will taxes that don’t come online for a couple of years affect the 2010 mid-term congressional election, you ask? Well, businesses are even now having to price into their spending and hiring plans the costs of Obamacare to them. Already this week, companies are announcing reduced earnings and layoffs in anticipation of Obamacare.
Caterpillar, for example, told The Wall Street Journal that moving to Obamacare will cost it $100 million this year alone. Similarly, Deere & Co, Iowa’s largest employer and maker of those famous green tractors and lawn mowers, puts the cost of Obamacare for it at $150 million, according to The Des Moines Register.
And other firms that don’t have such immediate costs are talking now about Obamacare’s impact on them next year and thereafter. In Massachusetts, The Boston Herald reports that Zoll Medical Corp. which makes medical devices that will become subject to new taxes in 2013, fears jobs now in the Bay State will have to be moved overseas for the company to stay in business.
Gov. Deval Patrick, one of Obamacare’s biggest boosters, told the Herald that “you better believe I will work to make modifications” to the federal program if it proves an “impediment to that industry.” One wonders why the governor wasn’t making such efforts before Obamcare became law but that’s an issue for another day.
The point here today is that these reports are just the beginning. The compliant Obama enthusiasts at The New York Times, The Washington Post and other media outlets are already trying to put the best possible face on Obamacare and will no doubt aid the administration’s forthcoming pr campaign to, yet again, “sell” the program to a deeply skeptical public.
But odds are that most of the news about Obamacare in coming months that people will pay attention to will be anything but positive. So, instead of trying to sell tomorrow what they couldn’t sell yesterday, a more prudent strategy for Democrats would be simply to shut up about Obamacare and pray that the president has an October Surprise in the wings.
Something on the order of perp-walking Osama bin Laden in chains down Pennsylvania Avenue.
Mark Tapscott is editorial page editor of The Washington Examiner and proprietor of Tapscott’s Copy Desk blog on washingtonexaminer.com.
