The use of football comparisons in American politics predates even the first Super Bowl. President Lyndon Johnson told the editor of The Commercial Appeal of Memphis, Tenn., during the late and urgent stages of his 1964 election campaign, “Three-quarters of this ball game’s done gone. We’re in the last quarter now, and we gotta pass, and go in through tackle, and under guard, and every other thing.” A little more than two years later, Bart Starr and the Green Bay Packers did all of those things themselves, shellacking the Kansas City Chiefs in the first “Supergame.”
More than 40 years and multiple football-obsessed presidents after that — including President Obama, who CBS’ Mark Knoller wrote may be responsible for “the longest football metaphor ever spoken by a presidential candidate” — the pigskin references at the federal level continue, and the Kansas City Chiefs are still losing big games. (Sorry, guys.) Just this week, one of Obama’s spin masters likened his vision for the healthcare law’s comeback to that of the Indianapolis Colts’ historic rally against the Chiefs in an NFL playoff game Saturday.
“There was a game just this weekend where a team (Indianapolis) was down by almost 30 points, and they came back and won in the end,” White House health adviser Phil Schiliro told Fusion about Indy’s 45-44 triumph over Kansas City. “Nobody’s going to remember [the Colts] behind. In years to come, they won’t remember the bad website in the beginning. What they’ll remember is more than 2 million Americans have enrolled. They’ll remember that 4 million Americans are on Medicaid. They’ll remember …”
Some words on that muffed comparison in a moment. First, a few on that Colts comeback. They trailed 38-10 in the third quarter, at which point their longshot odds to win were worse than one in a hundred. They required a combination of such excellent play and good fortune to recover that it’s natural the quarterback up to the task was named Luck. Andrew Luck. Despite his overgrown neck shrubbery the parks department forgot to mow, he could go unchallenged introducing himself with that sort of Bondian swagger at a cocktail bar. His preferred venue is the football field. His choice of drink is Gatorade, and his armament is his arm, which is more gifted than most. After going down by the 28-point deficit, he completed 17 of 23 passes for 314 yards and accounted for four total touchdowns, including an instinctual fumble recovery that he turned into the game’s most dramatic scoring play.
President Obama has copped to “fumbling” the healthcare law’s rollout. Is there anyone or anything out there capable of scooping up the ball and running it in?
A comeback requires an engineer — that’s why they call it “engineering a comeback” — and Obamacare has none. There is no spokesperson capable of buffing its exterior and making it presentable to the American people, and there is no tech official capable of repairing Healthcare.gov so well that it spits out substantially lower prices for insurance once people are able to use it. That, much like Delta learned recently, would be just another glitch.
Nor does the law have something in its playbook that would lead it to “victory,” a preferred outcome of the administration that one could fairly question is either winning a PR battle or actually improving the country’s healthcare system. Though it’s taken us a while to find out what is in it, Americans have familiarized themselves with Obamacare’s machinery. It didn’t necessarily let people keep their plans if they liked them, despite assurances to the contrary. It isn’t a lead-pipe lock that it’ll substantially cut emergency room visits, despite assurances to the contrary. It hasn’t turned loose a multitude of low-cost insurance policies, despite assurance to the contrary — by way of its name, the Affordable Care Act.
No, the White House doesn’t get to get away with saying the law has fallen into an early hole because of a “bad website.” It’s fallen into an early hole because it’s a bad program, and it doesn’t have the gameplan, personnel or Luck to mount a comeback. Where Obamacare is concerned, that’s where the football comparisons start and the final gun sounds.
