Cowardly Democrats volunteer unwanted second thoughts about ObamaCare
By: John Hayward
11/26/2014 01:50 PM
Democrats' Dreadful Obamacare Choices
There’s a little entertainment value in watching the sleazy Democrat Party react to its midterm butt-kicking by musing out loud that maybe ObamaCare wasn’t such a great idea after all, but if you carefully parse what these hacks are saying, it’s really just an attempt to change the subject. They’re trying to claim a little retroactive credit for something they didn’t actually do. They want to have their economy-crushing, health-care-destroying Big Government power grab, and trick people into praising them as thoughtful champions of the Sainted Middle Class. They’re seeking applause for praising the kind of statesmanlike debate they didn’t actually hold, and crafting the sort of solid bipartisan legislation they didn’t actually pass in that midnight festival of payoffs and backroom deals four years ago.
No dice, Democrats. The Sainted Middle Class is very well aware of your eagerness to screw them in the pursuit of your ambitions, and to please constituencies you value far more. No one’s really interested in hearing what you now think you should have done when you had total control of Congress and the White House. The subtext of the half-baked “second thoughts” related by Politico is that working with the minority party is essential to good governance… an attitude these Democrats most certainly did not have when they were running the whole show. Think of it as an early overture to the deafening Hallelujah Chorus for “bipartisanship” you’ll be hearing shortly after Mitch McConnell finishes setting up the last of his tchotchkes in the Senate Majority Leader’s office:
Democrats’ top message man Chuck Schumer criticized how his own party handled Obamacare’s political strategy on Tuesday, joining a list of prominent Democrats who’ve chastised their own party in recent days as they struggle to come to terms with a crushing defeat earlier this month.
Schumer commented at an event in Washington that Democrats “blew the opportunity the American people gave them” by concentrating on health care during the teeth of the recession in 2009 and 2010, calling it a focus on “the wrong problem.”
[...] Part of Schumer’s analysis was that the Affordable Care Act was not an effective plank for Democrats’ total control of Washington in 2009 and 2010 to make further inroads with the middle class. Though he’s stood at podiums with other Democrats behind their #ACAworks messaging campaign, Schumer said Tuesday that in 2009 and 2010 health care reform “wasn’t the change we were hired to make. Americans were crying out for an end to the recession.”
What a knee-slapper! Why, that’s almost as funny as the time Barack Obama said he realized there was no such thing as a “shovel-ready job” after he spent a trillion dollars of our money chasing them.
Schumer was joined in these nominal regrets by what is portrayed as a growing pool of Democrats, including Senators Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island:
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), a progressive star in the party who just joined the Senate Democratic leadership team that includes Schumer, backed his hypothesis.
“Sen. Warren agrees with Sen. Schumer that there was an urgent need in 2009 and 2010 to help middle-class families who were struggling to get by and that more should have been done,” said Lacey Rose, a Warren spokeswoman.
[...] “I agree with Chuck that the ACA was essential as our health care system was unjust and spinning out of control. I also agree that if we could have done more infrastructure first it would have connected more with working Americans, and our sales job was less than stellar,” said Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island in an email.
Say, now that you guys are admitting that ObamaCare was a mistake – an admission coming suspiciously close after the American people heard testimony from ObamaCare’s architect that it was all a lie – can we get rid of this crap and start over with real health care reform, or are you going to tug your jackboots back on and tell us that it’s the “settled law of the land” and can never be corrected?
We already know the answer to that, of course. This is all nothing more than a political sideshow designed to create a little “distance” between the Obama Titanic as it sinks beneath the waves. Every savvy Democrat wants to be in Kate Winslet’s position, floating away to safety on a bit of political wreckage, instead of getting sucked down with Leonardo.
You’ll notice this little “regretful Democrats” dance is also coming soon after Emperor Obama shredded the Constitution to force amnesty down our throats, with the risible justification that Presidents can assume dictatorial powers if Congress doesn’t pass a law after so many years. This led many people to wonder why only the Republicans are getting hassled for this new political crime of Not Getting Stuff Done, when Democrats had two years of unchallenged power to “fix” that “broken” immigration system. Schumer and company are nodding along with this criticism in the hope that everyone will forget their Party is the target of it.
The rest of the Politico piece is filled with testy backbiting from “progressives” dedicated to pretending ObamaCare isn’t unpopular, and chastising the Second Thoughts crew for turning their backs on such a magnificent liberal legacy. Some of that grousing is doubtless wrestler-style smack talk designed to make gullible moderate voters (and even more gullible Beltway reporters) believe a broad schism has opened between extremists and moderates in the Democrat Party. Some of it might be legitimate anger from activists too naive to understand the old Democrat strategy for hoodwinking voters into thinking they’re moderates who love the Sainted Middle Class, even as they lift taxpayers by the ankles and shake them until the small change comes tumbling out of their pockets
http://humanevents.com/2014/11/26/cowardly-democrats-volunteer-unwanted-second-thoughts-about-obamacare/
