The key step is to stop one of the worst items in the Democratic agenda: Obama's plan for socialized medicine. And the good news is that it looks like we have a very good chance of stopping it.
The latest news is that President Obama's poll numbers keep dropping. A Rasmussen tracking poll now shows him with an approval rating below 50% among likely voters (a more stringent standard than most polls) and shows him with a negative "Approval Index."
The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Monday shows that 30% of the nation's voters now Strongly Approve of the way that Barack Obama is performing his role as President. Forty percent (40%) Strongly Disapprove giving Obama a Presidential Approval Index rating of -10. Yesterday and today are the only time that Obama's Approval Index ratings have fallen to double digits in negative territory.
The important thing to notice is why Obama's approval ratings are dropping: they are dropping because he is pushing for socialized medicine. The more he argues for his plan, the less people are convinced.
It begins with the commentators. The Washington Post's Robert Samuelson is not a staunch free-marketer; he is essentially a pragmatist whose main focus is to insist that politicians are honest about their economic facts and figures. In his latest column, he offers a blunt assessment of Obama.
If you listen to President Obama, his "reform" will satisfy almost everyone. It will insure the uninsured, control runaway health spending, subdue future budget deficits, preserve choice for patients and improve quality of care. These claims are self-serving exaggerations and political fantasies.
The public is catching on, as well. I highly recommend an unusual report in the New York Times on the average American's reaction to Obama's defense of his health-care bill. Please do read the whole article, because it will open your eyes to the fact that Obama and his health-care plan are in deep, deep trouble with the American people.
Usually, the New York Times exists within an Upper West Side bubble, and its reporters tend not to notice the mood in flyover country until the Democrats lose an election, at which point they send their reporters out in a frantic effort to find out why. It's the Pauline Kael Effect, named after the film reviewer who is supposed to have said that she didn't understand how Nixon could have won the 1972 election—which he won by a landslide—because she didn't know anyone who voted for him.
Well, it seems as if at least one reporter for the Times is getting in touch with normal Americans ahead of time, and his report names the main reason the public is rejecting Obama's health-care proposal.
As Craig Brown watched President Obama’s news conference on Wednesday night on his TiVo-equipped television, he kept hitting the pause button so he could throw questions at the image frozen on the screen.
How much will this health care plan really cost, he asked. How can we cover nearly everybody without higher taxes or debt? Who is going to decide which treatments are allowed? Why cannot they just get rid of the waste without changing the whole system?
Like many in the country, Mr. Brown, a 36-year-old father of four who lives in an Atlanta suburb, has grown increasingly anxious about Washington’s efforts to reconfigure health care and what it may mean for his middle-class family. Although he and his wife, Judith, supported John McCain in the presidential race, they find Mr. Obama an earnest and compelling pitchman.
But they remain frustrated by the lack of available detail about his plan’s contours and cost.
They say they feel they are being asked to buy on spec from a government they do not trust. And they have lots of questions.
“The bottom line is there are so many unknowns,” said Ms. Brown, 35, who works part time at her church and cares for her young children. “What we do know is there is going to be more government control, and with more control you’re going to have fewer choices. It’s an innate part of being American to have those choices.”
This captures the essence of Obama's style: to offer no facts or details, just vague and general assurances that if we hand over all power to him, everything will turn out fine.
The best symbol of this approach is captured in one video clip: Obama's response at a town hall meeting to a questioner who asks about the health-care bill's provisions outlawing private health insurance. Obama says that he is "unfamiliar" with the specific provisions of the bill, but assures us that it won't take away our insurance. How can he offer that assurance, if he doesn't even know what the bill says? He is literally asking the American people to take him on faith.
Republican Senator Jim DeMint has gained some notoriety by describing the health-care bill as Obama's "Waterloo," but the analogy is a good one. Both defeats stem from the same kind of megalomaniacal over-reaching. Obama has the air of a man who still fervently believes his own hype—even as more and more of the public stops believing it.
Jack Wakeland sent me the best comment on what is going on:
"The whole Obama phenomenon—the thing that got him elected after running a campaign as a blank slate for people's hope and imagination, flying around the country fillings arenas and stadiums with rapt audiences, giving speeches about absolutely nothing—was the desire of many Americans to take part in the historical occasion of voting for America's first black president.
"As an Illinois resident and long-time student of the news who had been tracking Obama's meteoric rise from 2003 to the present, I made a proclamation to Rob Tracinski and company back in January: Obama had peaked on inauguration day. Everything else in his presidency would disappoint the majority.
"Well, now it's beginning to happen.
"The political panic that followed the collapse of credit and the stock market has abated. The majority of the American people are now looking forward to the long-term future: a $2 trillion federal deficit this year, a $1.5 trillion federal deficit next year, and $1 trillion federal deficits for ever after.
"And then President Obama and the Democratic leadership offered us a health-care 'reform' plan that is vast, incomprehensibly complex, and unexplained. Every question Obama was asked, he answered in his irritatingly purposeless, twenty-paragraph, filibuster style. But this time the American people really wanted answers, not more speeches about nothing.
"Every time conservatives pointed out, from their seats in their alternative media, the potentially devastating abuses of power that would be built into the new health-care 'system,' President Obama ignored them. He was not their president. Because his frame of reference is totally second-hand, five years of adoring comments and softball questions from the mainstream media has utterly convinced Barack Obama that the other half of the political spectrum does not exist.
"Barack Obama's Walter Mitty fantasy of being a universally admired world-historical figure continues, unbroken. It carried him through one health-care 'reform' speech and town hall meeting and press conference after another—15 in all—in which he gave the same answer to every single question: he assured his listeners that he, with his great intellect and unquestionably solid character, would see to it that the program would turn out all right.
"The problem is that the American people figured out that Barack Obama hasn't even read and comprehended the proposed programs. And he won't ever read or comprehend the final program. And he can't ever read or comprehend the program. He can't because no single human being could possibly read it and comprehend it.
"Barack Obama's approval rating will never rise above 55% again. As the economic malaise continues year after year after year, President Obama will continue to answer with more speeches about his good intellect and character, and he will continue to conduct more press conferences that he filibusters with answers about nothing. And his approval rating will slowly sink to 45%, 40%, 35%.
"By the time Mr. Obama finds himself absolutely despised by 50% of the American people, it will be too late. He will become disoriented and say and do things that horrify and embarrass his few remaining supporters. He will be a lame duck by December 2010 and go out as another one-term American president who will be mentioned in history books written decades from now because he was America's first black president—and because of nothing else."
I hope Jack's prediction is not over-optimistic, but we could be reaching a tipping point at which it becomes clear that Barack Obama is the second coming of Jimmy Carter.
But President Obama has complained (disingenuously) that this conflict isn't just about him. And it isn't. This isn't just about "breaking" the Obama administration's power. It is about putting an end to any new attempts at socialized medicine—and putting an end to them for a long time.
Over the weekend, the Washington Post carried an op-ed that argued in favor of Obama's health-care plan, but it had an amusing opening:
Barack Obama's strategy to pass health-care reform seems based on a simple principle: Whatever Bill Clinton did, do the opposite.
Where Clinton and his team crafted their health-care reform plan in the executive branch, Obama has left the details of his effort almost entirely to Congress. Where Clinton pursued an ambitious reconstruction of the entire sector, Obama has sought to preserve existing insurance arrangements and win the support of industry players. Where Clinton spent a year developing his bill before even getting to Congress, Obama lashed his efforts to a tight (and apparently unrealizable) timetable. Even the atmospherics offer contrasts: Clinton's big push for reform came in a soaring 1993 speech before a joint session of Congress, in which he offered painstaking details of his plans; Obama made his argument to the nation at a news conference last week, addressing concerns more than specifying proposals.
If we can defeat this new health care bill, when they did everything different and when they had every advantage—a popular president and filibuster-proof control of Congress—then maybe the Democrats will get the idea that socialized medicine wasn't defeated because they used the wrong political tactics. It was defeated because the people don't want it.
This is where the August congressional recess comes in. About a week from now, congressman will leave Washington to return to their home for a month, where they will spend their time attending public events and meeting with constituents—and getting an earful from the voters. What will happen is that they will encounter scenes like this one, in which a Democratic congressman tries to tell his audience that the health-care bill won't add to the deficit because it will pay for itself with unspecified cost savings—and he then gets laughed down by the audience.
I agree with The Politico when it says that "Congress’s failure to deliver major health care legislation by President Barack Obama’s deadline next month transforms the traditionally sleepy August recess into what could be the decisive moment in the battle to win support for the legislation, especially from conservative Democrats considered crucial to its fate."
This is a perfect opportunity for political activism in favor of liberty, and it is a rare case in which your own, individual action can make a substantial and immediate difference. Go to your congressman's and your senators' website, find out where they will be appearing during the August recess, and let them know, in person, that you oppose this government takeover of health insurance—that you don't want to become a helpless ward of the state.
For example, Tom Perriello—the representative for the district t
hat includes Charlottesville, Virginia—is holding a series of "Tom in Your Town" meetings where he advertises his willingness to meet constituents one-on-one to address their concerns. The whole thing has kind of a creepy feel to it, as if he is there for the lame, the halt, and the blind to approach him and asked to be healed. But it could be a very good opportunity to politely ask to meet with him and discuss health-care reform—and then tell him in no uncertain terms that he will lose your vote and make an enemy if he supports Obama's bill.
Perriello is a good target because he is a left-leaning politician in what has traditionally been a right-leaning district, so he will be a vulnerable incumbent in 2010. But this sort of thing is worth doing no matter what the makeup of your district or the views of your representative. I live a little bit outside of Charlottesville, for example, and my representative is Eric Cantor, the "minority whip" in the House. As a member of the Republican leadership, he is not likely to vote for Obama's bill; they smell blood and sense an opportunity to neutralize Obama politically. But if he returns to the seventh district and hears from many constituents who strongly oppose Obama's health-care bill, that will embolden him and the rest of the Republican leadership to press their advantage and to resist any pressure to compromise or agree to a watered-down version of the bill.
By the same token, even if your senator or representative is a committed leftist who is certain to vote for the bill, expressing your discontent will give him a sense that the public is opposed to it. This will make him more likely to understand the position of conservative Democrats in right-leaning districts and to refrain from pressuring them to commit political suicide by supporting the bill.
So this is your opportunity: just one additional person speaking out against Obama's health-care bill at a public meeting could help tilt your senator or representative against the bill. This is a rare opportunity to make a very material difference with very little effort and trouble.
If we do that, we can do more than just kill this bill and hobble the Obama administration. We can make certain that Congress won't launch any new attempts to socialize medicine for at least another decade.
—RWT
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