WASHINGTON – President Obama is portraying his campaign for a government-led, nationalized health care plan as a giant battle between himself and Republicans in Congress.
The White House, on the defensive in this fight, may think this is clever policy, but no one is actually buying it – except the media. The biggest obstacle to Obama’s ambitious and tax-heavy plan to create one of the largest entitlement programs in American history is not the powerless minority of the Republican Party that has played little or no strategic role in the emerging legislation. It’s all Democrats.
In the House, many of the 52 members of moderate Blue Dog Democrats threatened to block the pending bill. “I don’t like the idea of raising taxes in the face of the worst economic crisis since World War II,” said Rep. Mike Ross of Arkansas, the Blue Dogs’ chief negotiator. Last week he warned his party that there was “no way the current bill could be passed in the House. Not even close.”
In the Senate, Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid said he could not vote for a bill financed by an employee health benefits tax, warning his party could lose 10 to 15 Democrats if such a tax was included in the bill.
It doesn’t appear on the nightly newscasts, but a radical House Democratic bill with income tax rates that encourage the wealthy to exceed 50 percent has no chance of passing the Senate, where 60 Democrats currently govern. perch.
Democrats rejected the steep, draconian health care reform bill approved by the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. Democratic Sen. Kent Conrad of North Dakota, chairman of the Budget Committee, gave a thumbs down to a bill that the director of the Congressional Budget Office said would significantly augment health care costs, not lower them.
It’s not just Democratic members of Congress who are rebelling against the massive spending bills the president initiated in his zeal to take over the nation’s health care system in the middle of a severe recession. Key Democratic allies are advising their party to delay any action on bills they say could further weaken a shrinking economy struggling to recover.
Listen to what Democrat Robert Shapiro, a top economist at the Clinton administration’s Commerce Department, had to say in a recent analysis for the New Democratic Network: “Yet all the health care reforms being considered by Congress involve even higher health care costs for most businesses, which will mean further layoffs even as the economy grows. No one disputes that health care reform is an urgent national priority – as are efforts to reduce the risks of climate change. “But we gain little except a false sense of accomplishment by passing health care reforms that also exacerbate the new jobs problem, or climate legislation like Waxman-Markey that cannot deliver significant greenhouse gas reductions,” he wrote.
Instead, Shapiro advises his party to “first focus on the problems at the heart of the current economic downturn, and on issues related to jobs and incomes, before we pursue broad and urgent reforms in other areas. Politics, if nothing else, virtually dictates this, because a growing economy that creates large numbers of new jobs and increases incomes is always a prerequisite for public support for reforms that in one way or another impose new costs on them.”
Meanwhile, some Senate Democrats blamed Obama himself for opposing (correctly, in my opinion) a tax on certain employer-provided health insurance benefits to support pay for health care for the uninsured.
“The president is not helping. I don’t want that,” Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, R-Montana, told reporters last week as he and his colleagues scrambled to find alternatives that would allow him to generate $320 billion in additional revenue.
Perhaps the most disturbing sign of deepening divisions among Democrats in the bitter health care battle was the specter of the Democratic National Committee airing television ads against members of its party to pressure them to support Obama’s plans.
The ads, funded by Organizing for America, Obama’s pending campaign, are airing against Democratic senators from Nebraska, Ohio, Florida, Louisiana, Indiana, Arkansas and North Dakota. A furious Reid called them a “waste of money”. Their own president was “running ads against Democrats,” he fumed.
As support for health care appeared to be crumbling, Obama sought to unite his party last week; the president brought doubting Democrats to the White House in a desperate attempt to lure them back on board.
“The President sought my opinion on the situation in Congress that we discussed. For my part, I suggested that we not impose an arbitrary deadline to do something,” said Democratic Sen. Ben Nelson of Nebraska.
With polls showing that public approval of his approach to health care has dipped below 50 percent for the first time, the White House is desperate to pass legislation before Congress shuts down for the rest of the summer and his poll numbers weaken further. .
But it now seems unlikely that Obama will get Senate action before the August recess, which will give opponents more than a month to mount full-scale campaigns against his grandiose plans. And then the Republican lobbying machine will be in full swing.
