Douglas Schoen (pollster for Bill Clinton) and Patrick Caddell (pollster for Jimmy Carter) try to explain what E.J. Dionne (professional liberal for the Washington Post) and Gail Collins (professional liberal for the New York Times) can't figure out on their own.
Dionne can't figure out why Democrats aren't bursting with pride and enthusiasm.
Democrats should feel a lot better than they do. They enacted a health care bill that had been their dream for more than 60 years. They pulled the country out of a terrifying economic spiral. They are on the verge of passing the biggest reform of Wall Street since the New Deal. The public has identified enemies that are typically seen as Republican allies: oil companies and big bankers. And given the Republicans' past policies, the Gulf oil spill is at least as much their problem as Obama's.
Collins had hoped that Obama would declare war on the oil companies. You know. Those feckless villains who produce the stuff that gets you to work everyday and heats your home. Those guys.
As a political leader, Barack Obama seems to know what he’s doing. His unsatisfying call for a new energy policy sounded very much like the rhetoric on health care reform that used to drive Democrats nuts: open to all ideas, can’t afford inaction, if we can put a man on the moon. ... But at the end of that health care slog, he wound up with the groundbreaking law that had eluded his predecessors for decades. The process of wringing it out of Congress was so slow and oblique that even when it was over it was hard to appreciate what he’d won. But win he did.
Obama won! He got a health care bill through congress! What's not to like? We're going to bend the health care cost curve down, reduce the deficit, improve care, and cover millions more people! Or not.
The economic report released last week by Health and Human Services, which indicated that President Barack Obama's health care "reform" law would actually increase the cost of health care and impose higher costs on consumers, had been submitted to the office of HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius more than a week before the Congressional votes on the bill, according to career HHS sources, who added that Sebelius's staff refused to review the document before the vote was taken.
"The reason we were given was that they did not want to influence the vote," says an HHS source. "Which is actually the point of having a review like this, you would think."
There just aren't enough starry eyed rubes out there who believe the health care bill is going to live up to the promises that got it through, particularly the ones about reducing the deficit. Even without all the legislative bribes that went into it.
But Schoen and Caddell get it. Or at least they seem to. Loyal Democrats that they are, they may not approve but they get it.
The American people are looking for candidates and parties that champion fiscal discipline, limited government, deficit reduction and a free market, pro-growth agenda. The tea party movement grew as a result of this desire, and its support is a reflection of a broad-based desire to elect candidates who are fiscally conservative and not tied to current policies.
Voters are growing increasingly concerned with the mounting deficit, a trend that is likely to be exacerbated with the national debt now exceeding $13 trillion. A Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll in mid-May found a notable increase in recent months in those who believe cutting the deficit and spending should be the government's highest priority—20% of those surveyed wanted the deficit and spending to be the government's top priority, up from 13% in January.
With unemployment still above 9%, the idea that the government could sustain economic recovery on its own with a new stimulus package doesn't appeal to the cynical electorate. And the thought of adding a trillion dollar health-care reform program is terrifying—notwithstanding the Congressional Budget Office's estimate that ObamaCare will reduce the federal budgetary commitment to health care in the coming decade.
I'd be willing to bet that not even Dionne and Collins really believe the health care bill will reduce costs and reduce the deficit. And nobody thinks it's going to improve care. But Dionne and Collins are willing to say they believe it because that's what progressives do. They have an agenda.
And the agenda is all important because the agenda is designed to lock in progressive control. Imagine a unionized health care industry. One sixth of the US economy funneled right into the Democratic party coffers. Who needs to worry about the deficit!
Progressives don't and they never did. They say they worry about deficits when it's to their political advantage. Like when there's a Republican in the White House. Or when they want to promote Orwellian legislation like health care reform, advertised as deficit reduction. And there's their problem.
Nobody believes them. They don't even believe themselves.
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