John Heilemann and Mark Halperin’s opening scene in their best-selling “Game Change” on the 2008 campaign has Barack Obama bolting out of bed at 3 a.m. in an Iowa hotel room. The future president was “consumed by a thought at once electric and daunting: I might win this thing.”
Obama was so full of promise then. He did go on to win the election, with the catalyst being his unexpected victory in the Iowa caucuses just a few days after his middle-of-the-night epiphany.
The opening tableau of “Game Change” sent me scrambling to reread the speech Obama gave the night he won in Iowa. Reading the Iowa speech with the benefit of hindsight, it’s obvious there’s a very fine line between full of promise and full of it.
If candidate Obama was the former, then President Obama is the latter.
“I’ll be a president who finally makes health care affordable and available to every single American the same way I expanded health care in Illinois — by bringing Democrats and Republicans together to get the job done,” he said then.
We’re now staring down the barrel of the president’s $2 trillion health reform bill (that’s the price tag once you dispense with mendacious Democratic budget gimmicks) that no Republican in Congress supports and is opposed by a majority of the country.
Even more striking, more than 10 percent of House Democrats don’t support it, and the House Democrats who do support it were afraid to actually vote on it.
The very same brash and, yes, hopeful first-term senator also said on that chilly night in Des Moines, “The time has come to tell the lobbyists who think their money and their influence speak louder than our voices that they don’t own this government, we do; and we are here to take it back.”
Again we see candidate Obama’s vision at odds with presidential reality. Note that Patrick Gaspard, Obama’s White House political director — a post previously held by Karl Rove — is the former top lobbyist for the powerful Service Employees International Union.
What does this mean for health care? Well, the original Senate health care bill was largely funded by a tax on expensive insurance policies, aka “Cadillac plans.”
The proposed tax would have hit unions hard, and they complained loudly. After Obama introduced his own version of the health care bill, the threshold for the “Cadillac tax” had been raised considerably, and the tax wouldn’t kick in for eight years — plenty of time for Democrats to find a way to exempt unions altogether.
Just down the hall from the Oval Office is the chief lobbyist for a union that spent $60 million getting Obama and congressional Democrats elected in 2008. Do you think this might have had something to do with this dramatic change to health care reform legislation?
Candidate Obama seemed so optimistic then. “They said this country was too divided; too disillusioned to ever come together around a common purpose,” he said.
That common purpose he spoke of in Iowa was getting himself elected. Since then, Americans haven’t had many reasons to come together. If the disillusionment remains, the president ought to consider what he’s done to exacerbate it. Looking at the polls on health care would be a good start.
No doubt there will be more health care reform hurdles for the president to clear. But before the president goes forward, I hope he pauses to reflect on the promises of his candidacy, fully aware that many Americans are lying awake at night terrified of health care reform and thinking: He might win this thing.
Mark Hemingway is an editorial page staff writer for The Washington Examiner. He can be reached at [email protected].
