A little self-flagellation

Here's a riddle for you: What do you get when you cross 12 years of majority status with a party that has its collective head in the sand?

Answer: Obamacare.

As much as we conservatives and Republicans want to wail and gnash our teeth over the heavy-handed, manipulative tactics of the Democrats in getting this behemoth of a bill passed, we really have only ourselves to blame. Healthcare reform is not a new issue. In 1992, when President Clinton took office, consumers were complaining about runaway costs, capricious insurance denials, no real choices, and haphazard delivery. Hillary Clinton became the first First Lady to take an active policy role in trying to shape an overhaul of the healthcare system to address these issues and create a system that insured everyone. We heard exactly the same arguments for and against her ideas as we've heard over Obamacare. Republicans - and the general public - recoiled. Of course we need healthcare reform, we said, but it should be targeted to the real needs in the system - we didn't need some sweeping overhaul that would destroy the best medical system in the entire world. We needed lawsuit reform, portability, more consumer choice and direct access so people could see how much their healthcare actually costs. Eventually Hillary Clinton's plans were tossed out as too far-reaching, too socialistic. Americans didn't want socialized medicine, plain and simple. They elected Republicans to a majority in 1994 to rein in the left and bring balance back to federal government.

Republicans held Congressional majorities for 12 years. For 8 of those years, we held control of the executive and the legislative branch. There was nothing we couldn't have done. We had a golden, perhaps once in a lifetime opportunity to enact the kind of reforms that would have transformed the medical industry in America and provided a shining example for the rest of the world for how to provide effective, cost-efficient healthcare that rewarded innovation and success and left no patient behind.

Instead, we did...nothing.

No tort reform. No delivery streamlining. No portability. No reforms of insurance pools or patient coverage. Oh, we managed to create a bill to cover prescription medications for some folks, but we even screwed that up. All we really did was expand bureaucracy and increase costs. For the most part, Republicans put healthcare reform on the back burner, telling ourselves that the public cared more about the war on terror than the state of our medical system.

The funny thing is, people did continue to care. The healthcare system is something that affects all of us every day - taking care of children or aging parents; dealing with insurance companies, providers, pharmacies, government agencies; paying the co-pays, the deductibles, the out-of-network, out-of-pockets. The maze is confusing at best, rife with traps that cost you dearly or dead ends that don't heal your ills. The costs are ridiculous - insurance premium increases of 15% or more annually are not unusual even when inflation stays near zero.

So, the Democrats come along, led by this charismatic "Yes We Can!" leader who promised to bring Utopia into being with his presidency. With commanding majorities in both houses, he had a golden, perhaps once in a lifetime opportunity to enact the kind of reforms that will transform the medical industry in America. The difference? President Obama did it. We may not like his vision or his methods, but he did it. The Democrats now own the healthcare issue. And beyond our goldfish bowls of cynicism and beltway politics, here is a sampling of real statements from average people about the bill:
"I'm glad that now self-employed people can buy into insurance pools like employees do."
"Now my husband doesn't have to stay with his job to keep our health insurance. We can take our policy with us."
"My neighbor can't be denied coverage for her heart condition."
"I know there are things in the bill I won't like, but we can fix those. At least this is a start."

Hear that? That's the sound of American common sense and compassion talking. Those are Republican ideas. But we will never be able to claim them now, because we failed to provide clear leadership when we had the chance. The American people wanted action. They wanted some direction. We didn't provide any, so they took the only direction that was laid out, knowing it would have to be fixed later.

We have a chance to fix it in November. Will we be fit to lead?

Muzzling the President

The heated controversy around an upcoming speech planned for the beginning of the school year by President Obama on the importance of education is dangerously close to at least equal mankind’s annual contribution to global warming. Parents are threatening to pull their children from school on September 8th, political organizations are calling for boycotts of schools that show his nationally televised speech, teachers’ unions are issuing marching orders for their members to show the speech no matter what parents and school administration officials say, and policy think tanks are renewing their arguments for private and charter schools to ensure that students have “freedom of thought” rather than suffer from government-imposed indoctrination of leftist values.

What???

This is the President of the United States. This is the leader of the free world. This is the highest office of the most free and prosperous nation in the history of mankind – one that considers the right of free speech as one of its most sacred foundational cornerstones. Yet people are calling for a ban on his welcome back to school speech. Consider what is being demanded: people are calling – no, they are howling – for public schools to suppress a speech from the President of the United States.

Have a large number of Americans suddenly lost their minds? Have they decided that free speech is no longer an essential right, and the best way to set the example is to gag the President?

I would suggest that this is not quite the case. Rather, the outrage is coming from a keen sense of deep distrust on this particular President’s motives. It is unprecedented for the President to deliver a back to school welcome speech, but that isn’t enough to raise this kind of ire. That his soft, feel-good message of working hard and staying in school comes precisely when his approval ratings are suffering a TKO and his bungled health care plan is barely hanging on life support smacks of pandering still doesn’t deserve such passionate opposition to a mere back to school speech. No. Anger this visceral comes from a deep-seated belief that Barack Obama isn’t addressing our nation’s students to encourage them to stay in school. Instead, concerned people believe that Barack Obama is trying to indoctrinate their children over to his side on policy, pitting child against parent in a war over values, priorities and a fundamental vision of what America should be as a nation. That’s pretty powerful stuff.

But does he deserve such a reputation? Well, let’s look at his very short history:

In the first month of his administration, Barack Obama shoved Republicans aside from discussions on economic stimulus, smugly telling them “he won”, so things were going to be done his way;
In the second month of his administration, Barack Obama put together a plan to take over the financial industry and the auto industry all while protecting those who decimated the housing industry;
In the third month of his administration, Barack Obama appointed multiple Cabinet and staff whose tax dodging and other legal entanglements compromised his pledges of honesty and integrity in government;
In the fourth and fifth months of his administration, Barack Obama’s right hand Rahm Emmanuel was caught trying to take control of the U.S. Census process to tilt the counting of American citizens to favor Democrats in election politics;
In the last three months of his administration, Barack Obama has tried to shove an unbelievably bloated, contorted, impossible to understand, implement and pay for healthcare system under the guise of reform without letting people read or debate it. We also discovered that he had reached back room deals with a number of insurance companies in the process – a practice he specifically said would not happen during his term.
Now, it has come to light that Barack Obama’s education speech isn’t just a speech, it’s the focus of a lesson plan developed by the White House to challenge children to find ways they can help him.

I’m sorry, but if the shoe fits…

Barack Obama has caused this outrage because of his heavy-handed tactics to push his policies through, his arrogance and smugness, his willingness to intentionally surround himself with people who do not measure up to public standards of moral and ethical conduct, and his brazen (and ill-conceived) intentions of taking control of just about every industry in America. That kind of conduct breeds intense distrust in Americans; we don’t like people who act like they’re better than we are, and we surely don’t like people who try to pull the wool over our eyes and then insult us for taking it off. Barack Obama has politicized the office of the Presidency so much so that 63% of Americans (according to a recent Facebook poll) would rather ban public addresses by the President in schools unless they have been reviewed by parents and teachers first than let those addresses happen without oversight. This is a serious problem. If Americans distrust their President so deeply they would rather censor him than listen to him, how can we hope to build any kind of common ground anywhere going forward?