The New Neo

Megan McArdle accomplishes the admirable feat of condensing the history of Obamacare into one insightful article that explains how and why the Democrats’ hubris has landed them in such a pickle.

Please read the whole thing. Here’s an excerpt:

…Democrats wanted universal coverage and a major overhaul of both the insurance market and the American social contract.

Unsurprisingly, the massive and unpopular transformation failed to attract any Republican votes. When Republicans had faced similar electoral math on Social Security reform — an opposition party implacably opposed, and the electorate clearly against it — they’d abandoned their efforts. That is what parties do when they reach such an impasse; it’s what Democrats did on Clintoncare. No program this large had ever passed on a party-line vote, because this was correctly viewed as political suicide. Nancy Pelosi managed to get it through the House anyway, which should go down as one of the most impressive political achievements in history, and Harry Reid shepherded another version through the Senate. When Republicans protested, they were rather smugly told that “elections have consequences.”

Then Ted Kennedy died. Massachusetts — Massachusetts! — elected Republican Scott Brown in an election that often seemed to revolve around the health-care bill. Democrats still pressed forward. Without the votes to overcome a Republican filibuster, they had the House pass a draft Senate bill that had never been meant to become law and used some procedural tap-dancing to push some fixes through the Senate. Such maneuvering wasn’t unprecedented, but it wasn’t popular, either. And the limitations of the method they used left the bill with all sorts of problems, many of which we are dealing with now…

Democrats believed that the unpopular bill they had just rammed through on a party-line vote would not only get more popular, but also make them more popular, thereby giving them the political support they needed to pass more fixes — fixes that would have been needed even on a less messy draft bill, because anything this complicated is unlikely to work as written. As I noted at the time, this seemed borderline delusional. Democrats lost the House and some Senate seats in the 2010 election, and Obamacare was a major contributor to that loss. Whereupon Democrats learned what apparently didn’t occur to them in 2009: that there might be other elections, with different consequences…

Democrats have been complaining — loudly and repeatedly — that Republican opposition tactics on the Affordable Care Act are unprecedented. This is true, but not for the reasons that Democrats are telling themselves. No political party was ever foolhardy enough to pass such a big bill, with such sweeping consequences for so many people, without the support of a majority of their countrymen and at least a few members of the opposite party. Once they had done this unprecedented thing, the unprecedented reaction was predictable — and indeed predicted by myself and others.

Indeed.

All this was known at the time. As I wrote two days after the ACA was signed into law with a flourish and major Democratic hoopla:

No, there has never been another bill like it. Historical. The comparisons to Social Security or Medicare are laughable as well. Yes, there was some opposition to both among conservatives of the time. But they were very much minority voices and did not carry the day even within the Republican Party. Both bills were hugely popular with large majorities of Americans, and passed with overwhelming bipartisan support in Congress. No one had to go out afterwards to “sell” them like a snake-oil pitchman; they had already sold themselves.

The process by which the bills passed was the normal one, as well. And, more importantly (even though we see the enormous fiscal costs now), they were mostly seen at the time as “win-win” situations by the American public. Nearly everyone paid into them and everyone would be getting something out of them, and for the vast majority of Americans they did not replace better benefits that were already in place…

The comparison many liberals have made to Social Security and Medicare was wishful thinking. There were no similarities in the political sense, and this fact was likely to matter tremendously. The Democrats didn’t think bipartisan support of such a huge program was necessary in the sense that they had managed to find the votes to pass it minus any Republican support. They wanted it so badly that they thought that was enough, because somehow they’d spin it to the American people, who would end up liking it well enough, too, once they saw the goodies it contained. That was the Medicare and Social Security precedent they were looking at: that enough people would like its perks that they would never want to let it go once they experienced them.

What did they forget? They forgot that bipartisan support is good for a lot of other things than just passing a bill. Bipartisan support means that both parties have to take ownership of a bill, both blame and credit. It also gives Congress time to debate a bill, and to possibly even improve it with the help of feedback from the other side that will temper its extremity and/or correct its errors.

But the Democrats couldn’t risk that, and they didn’t really want it anyway. They wanted what they wanted, and they saw their chance after all these decades of waiting (since the Truman years at the very least). They felt they’d compromised enough already this time by not having single payer or a public option (recall that it was only Joe Lieberman’s objection that stopped the latter from becoming part of the law).

They rushed it through while they could, and thought they’d deal with the aftermath later. Well, now they’re dealing.

Even as recently as a week ago, it might have seemed as though the Obamacare tempest would pass. And I suppose that could still end up happening, somewhere down the road. But the revelations of wrongdoing have become so extreme, and the incompetence so undeniable (although many supporters will continue to deny it), that Obamacare seems to unravel more every single day.

I would feel more schadenfreude if it weren’t so frightening that this is the same crew that is at the helm of our ship of state. Is it a ship of fools*?

[*NOTE: I don’t mean to open up the old “knaves vs. fools” debate. Both seem to be operating at once.]

[NOTE II: I’d caution Ben Domenech that the change of mind we’re seeing in many people is not necessarily fundamental, much less generalizable or permanent. Hubris can work both ways. However, when Ezra Klein agrees that the last week has seen Obamacare’s fortunes slide precipitously, and sounds very somber about it, you know things are going very badly for Obamacare.]