Obamacare: Two-Strike Breaking Pitch

I’m 0-for-2. At least.

First, I was bamboozled by Sarah Palin and what she ostensibly represented…until I saw the Katie Couric interview and realized what she represented was the impossibility of her credibility as long as they were inexorably associated with such unadulterated brainlessness. Additionally, she also represented the inability of the GOP team to find good people to work for them, which would have portended another term of W.-like incompetence in a McCain administration; they wouldn’t have been able to execute, even if their principles were correct.

Then came Obama’s inaugural address, and I like everyone else except for the true doctrinaire right-wingers assumed from the combination of that speech and his Cabinet appointments of Rahm Emanuel, Larry Summers, Arne Duncan and their ilk that he planned to govern from the center, as opposed to adopting the ”socialist” and “pro-terrorist” policies the GOP tried to tag him with. Alas, the only one privy to the definition of said “Center” was the new President himself; more specifically, it seems as if he considers his policy regimen to be the true centrism.

While many on the right cried “socialism” with the stimulus package and the governmental net cast over the banking and automotive industry, even such free-market personages as Alan Greenspan had publically admitted that some intervention was needed, rendering that argument less than salient, so if the economic center had moved left, it had dome so on its own accord, if not a result of deregulatory-elicited messes. And, while certainly every foreign policy move Obama has made, from Gitmo to Cairo to Mary Robinson, belies any true centrist—even “realist”—mindset, and is a blatant attempt to centralize appeasement/”America First—In Guilt” policy, I would have been called on my politics being inexorably biased by my Judeocentrism. [Not that there’s anything wrong with that, or being Israel-centric; more that there are people who defend the state from Obama and his ilk better than I would, without necessarily preaching to the choir.]

That’s why Obamacare and its concomitant raising of the spectre of 1993 and 1994 theoretically had, at least initially, handed me—and other conservatives, self-hating and otherwise—a policy against which one could be truly opposed in principle. Never mind the nuances; this was going to involve an imposition of governmental control regarding issues of supply and demand where there was no real mandate for it. As Jon Meachem pointed in Newsweek, unlike social security or voting rights, universal health care doesn’t have the same sui generis moral imprimatur that would otherwise make it amenable to such a policy imposition; there was no reason that Obama wouldn’t fail as his attempt to become FDR and LBJ the way Bill Clinton did in 1994. Additionally, as David Gergen theorized in Rolling Stone, as Obamacare would be the one issue that could not be hung upon the previous administration with any degree of credibility, failure to implement it in at least some degree would lead to the Democrats being punished at the polls in 2010.

So, expecting a fastball down the middle [an Obamacare more or less analogous to Hillarycare], we get a breaking pitch way too close to take: Obama announces that the “public option” may be taken off the table.

Brilliant?

Not necessarily; it’s more that, people keep forgetting that Obama doesn’t feel like he owes anyone anything, so he can manipulate his policy to suit himself and his aim of keeping his [and liberals’] power. Those on the further left are angry, sure; but where else can they go? The conservative Democrats are more likely to support his legislation, and GOP’ers really now have lost possibly their most salient reason for continued intransigence [though one shouldn’t count against their propensity to continue as such.]

This guy will do anything to make sure he won’t lose, and he won’t even have to triangulate.