Beacon Street Journal

Here we go again…

Whenever the object of the media’s unrestrained adoration is in political trouble with large swaths of the American electorate, as sure as the sun will rise tomorrow, you can bank on left wing pundits playing the race card. In the wake of the fierce resistance to Obamacare, pundits on the left, with robotic predictability, have resurrected their tiresome theme that those who are resistant to the charms of The One, are at heart, racists. We witnessed this phenomenon at length during Obama’s primary campaign against Hillary and it continues unabated. The latest manifestation of this meme is Frank Rich’s vitriolic assault on the tea party movement.

The latest Rich column, a diatribe masquerading as penetrating and perspicacious political analysis, posits that the root cause of the opposition to Obama’s radical alteration of one-sixth of the U.S. economy is the irascible fear of white people watching a black man ascend to the highest office in the land:

If Obama’s first legislative priority had been immigration or financial reform or climate change, we would have seen the same trajectory. The conjunction of a black president and a female speaker of the House — topped off by a wise Latina on the Supreme Court and a powerful gay Congressional committee chairman — would sow fears of disenfranchisement among a dwindling and threatened minority in the country no matter what policies were in play. It’s not happenstance that Frank, Lewis and Cleaver — none of them major Democratic players in the health care push — received a major share of last weekend’s abuse. When you hear demonstrators chant the slogan “Take our country back!,” these are the people they want to take the country back from.

For Rich, the tea party protests signal that it’s Selma, Alabama, 1965 once again. The neanderthal, red-neck members of the tea party movement are impotently standing athwart the inexorable progressive march of history. The only item missing from his fevered column was eye-witness accounts of paunchy, white, tobacco chewing sheriffs, with leash-restrained snarling German shepherds and fire hoses at the ready mixed in amongst the all-white, angry tea party mob.

Not to be outdone, Rich’s fellow tag-team columinst, Charles Blow, weighed in with his assessment of the tea party anti-Obamacare protests:

…President Obama and what he represents has jolted extremists into the present and forced them to confront the future. And it scares them.

Even the optics must be irritating. A woman (Nancy Pelosi) pushed the health care bill through the House. The bill’s most visible and vocal proponents included a gay man (Barney Frank) and a Jew (Anthony Weiner). And the black man in the White House signed the bill into law. It’s enough to make a good old boy go crazy.

In the wake of Scott Brown’s stunning upset Senate victory in Massachusetts, Blow penned a column wherein he characterized those who strenuously opposed Obamacare as an angry, fickle mob. Yet, Blow’s bread and circus metaphors are misplaced. The more appropriate classical Roman analogy would be that ever since the last presidential campaign, Blow and his ilk have been functioning  as Barack Obama’s Praetorian Guard.

Rich’s latest column is a sad commentary on the intellectual bankruptcy of the left. In terms of buttressing support for the policies of their anointed savior, the strategy of the media is as predictable as it is transparent: stigmatize opponents of the Obama Administration as closet racists.

Just one week after President Obama signed his signature health care reform bill into law, a new Gallup poll shows that the country is as firmly entrenched against his scheme as before its passage, as the slight approval bounce he received has proved rather fleeting. So much for the Obama as a reinvigorated political Colossus theme that has been trumpeted in the old legacy media over the past several days.

The sordid political process that produced this legislative boondoggle has not gone unnoticed by a still angry electorate. The bill was rammed through at the last minute to save Obama’s presidency, and no one bothered, nor had the time, to read 2,700 pages of the most significant piece of legislation of the past fifty years. The shoddy sausage making has resulted in predictable results, as embarrassing errors and unpleasant consequences are already being revealed before the ink has even dried.

The Gallup poll indicates that most Americans believe the new health care bill will harm the economy, reduce the quality of health care delivery and will adversely impact an already dangerously swollen federal deficit. The problem for Obama is that he squandered his credibility with the disastrous stimulus package and since its passage, Americans have been resistant to his rhetorical flights of fancy. The short-lived bounce in the approval polls indicates that continued speeches by Obama will have little impact on swaying a disbelieving and skeptical electorate on the virtues of Obamacare. As Newsweek’s Howard Fineman recently noted the president has, “dug himself a partisan hole with this big bill, and it’ll be interesting to see him try to dig his way out.”

Stripped bare of all its misleading minutiae, the promise of Obamacare in a nutshell is this: we’re going to insure an additional 30 million people who don’t have health insurance, yet provide everybody, including those who already have health insurance, with better coverage, at lower cost and to paraphrase the president, “not add one dime to the deficit.” Barack Obama spent the entire first year of his presidency communicating this childish fantasy to an unreceptive and disbelieving electorate. In the end, since nobody was buying what he was selling, Obama was forced to justify the bill’s passage by claiming it’s the “right thing to do.”

That many gleeful liberals either believe the pollyannish nonsense of Obamacare, or what’s actually worse, know its deficit-reduction pledges are not true, but don’t care, is rather disconcerting. In the wake of the passage of Obamacare, the immediate problem for the Democrats is that the benefits of Obama’s signature domestic issue were clearly oversold and its deleterious economic impact, in terms of  increased taxes and substantially increasing the deficit, were shamefully and grossly understated. Democrats falsely comfort themselves in their belief that once Americans realize the benefits conferred, opposition will diminish. This is wishful thinking, as most of the costs of the program are immediate, while the tangible benefits won’t be realized until 2014.

In order to create the illusion of Obamacare’s deficit reduction features, Democrats had to game the system in order to receive an acceptable ten-year score from the CBO. They accomplished this wizardry by engaging in pure accounting chicanery — front loading the costs, deferring the benefits, and placing the $300 billion “Doc Fix” off the books. The result? Most Americans can expect that their premiums will increase substantially, while the quality of care dispensed will diminish as many physicians leave the practice of medicine. And of course, there are the $500 billion cuts to Medicare.

In light of the ineluctable fact that the nation’s two principal entitlement programs, Social Security and Medicare  face imminent bankruptcy, the passage of Obamacare could hardly be considered propitious for the Democrats. How do the Democrats escape the quandary and fiscal recklessness of adding another massive new entitlement program on top of Social Security and Medicare’s insolvency? Look for the implementation of a Value Added Tax on the horizon.

For Democrats, the VAT tax is an entirely salubrious solution and one that is consistent with their underlying philosophical goal of making the United States more like what they view as the beneficent social welfare states of continental Europe: if you want to be more like Europe, then you are going to have to emulate their tax schema which includes substantially higher individual tax rates.

Although Obama didn’t dare refer to a VAT when arguing for the passage of his bill, it is going to be necessary to help pay for Obamacare’s bundle of goodies. So much for his promise not to raise taxes on families making less than $250,000. But this should come as no surprise to a president whose promises on a wide range of issues have clear expiration dates.

For Democrats, the end justifies the means. That was the unequivocal message delivered by President Obama during his evasive interview yesterday with Fox News’ Bret Baier during which he refused to answer questions about the extraordinary and unconstitutional procedures by which Democrats are attempting to ram through the health care bill in the House. Obama cavalierly  brushed aside questions about the propriety of passing a monumental piece of legislation which a substantial majority of Americans fervently oppose that will impact one-sixth of the economy by parliamentary chicanery. Obama gave the green light for Democrats latest procedural contrivance: “deeming” a piece of legislation passed by congress without any of its members actually voting for the Senate bill. The Democrats care not one whit that these are the very same political tactics that characterized banana republics. If that is what it takes to implement their ideological crown jewel, then so be it.

Obama’s endorsement of the Slaughter Rule is the latest indication, if any further evidence was needed, that the Democrats are prepared to say and do anything to foist their 2700 page monstrosity on the American public. Article 1, Section 7 of the Constitution and the will of the people be damned. That is why, should the bill pass, it will be stigmatized as  illegitimate by a large segment of the electorate. And, since the costs and increased taxes mandated by the bill will be felt immediately, the health care debate will continue to rage on.

Talk of implementing the Slaughter Rule is not only an act of ruthlessless by desperate Congressional Democrats, but it also exhibits contempt for the American people. Democrats falsely comfort themselves with the perverse notion that wavering Blue Dog Democrats will be insulated from a yes vote  on the Senate bill because ordinary citizens will not be able to see through this blatant legislative ruse. This meme has been persistently trumpeted by Obmama and has now been adopted by the entire Democratic establishment. Democrats claim, in an act of self-delusion, that Americans don’t care about arcane legislative procedures and processes. Yet the outcry occasioned by the Cornhusker kickback, the Louisiana purchase and other legislative bribes and backroom deals all but guarantee that the American people will be paying close attention.

The leasder of the Democratic Party has staked his presidency on passage of a bill that through legislative subterfuge, nefarious back-room deals and accounting gimmickry has evolved into a monstrosity that has created a stench that now permeates the land. All that matters to Congressional Democrats at this point is to insure that Obama is not handed a legislative defeat that will fatally weaken his presidency.

After years of unceremoniously putting his foot in his mouth, this gem could well be the political obituary that appears over his grave come next November. As a loyal liberal foot-soldier, Harry Reid is poised to take one for the Democratic team over his support of the Obama Administration’s wildly unpopular domestic agenda. In the latest polls for his re-election bid in Nevada, he trails his Republican opponents by double digits.

As evidenced by the video clip, Reid’s comment is a product of the chicanery and spin that has emanated from Democratic Party leaders to justify their nearly $1 trillion economic stimulus boondoggle that has not created any jobs, but has swollen an already out-of-control federal deficit. The pathetic attempt to spin the disastrous stimulus policy has caused Democrats to add a new metric to our economic lexicon: “jobs saved or created.” This novel and patently absurd indice, incapable of measurement, has been used to assuage a deficit-weary public from the deleterious ramifications of the Democrats fiscal recklessness.

Harry Reid has been spouting this nonsense since the stimulus passed. It should come as no surprise in this Alice-in-Wonderland world in which he resides that the latest gloomy unemployment figures would be characterized as an unequivocal blessing. Nothing better illustrates how oblivious and utterly disconnected Democratic Party Beltway elites have become from the electorate than the fact that a dismal jobs picture would be cause for celebration.

Obama’s speech yesterday on the urgent necessity of passing his leviathan bill was his thirty-fifth such invocation. Yet, Americans still remain fervently opposed to his health care plan. What does this tell us about the Democrats? The attempt by Democrats over the past year, both substantive and procedurally, to enact a government takeover of our health care delivery system reveals that when it comes to implementing liberals decades-old dream of socialized medicine, the Democrats don’t care one whit about the will of the electorate. Nothing is going to stand in their way. This was the message behind Nancy Pelosi’s imploring her Blue Dog colleagues in the House recently to fall on their swords for the greater good and glory of Obamacare. We’re getting a government run health care delivery system whether we want it or not.

Popular sovereignty is no match for  and has taken a back seat to the fervor and ideological commitment of dedicated hard-left liberals such as Pelosi, Reid and President Obama. This posture helps explain recent commentary by many liberal pundits to the effect that the American people are too stupid to understand the beneficence that Obama is showering upon them with his 2,700 page monstrosity and that once they learn of the bills advantages by further communication from the White House the more they will like it.

In terms of the reconciliation process, forget about the Senate, because the bill’s fate will ultimately be decided in the House. This is because the House must pass the Senate bill, as it stands, word for word without a single change. This creates a dilemma for Nancy Pelosi, as it is not entirely clear how she can persuade Bart Stupak and his other colleagues who are on record as claiming they will vote no due to the unacceptable abortion language in the Senate bill.

Given the unpopularity of the health care bill in their congressional districts, Other Blue Dog Democrats, in the interest of self-preservation, may not be so willing to heed Pelosi’s call for committing what will amount to an act of political hari kare.