Pat Dollard

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As confirmed by recent polling data, Obama’s pitch that the country’s existing health care system is in need of radical alteration has fallen upon deaf ears. The more people learn of the details of Obama’s plan, the less they like it.

One of the reasons Obama’s health care initiative is now badly floundering is that ever since his inauguration, he has failed to appreciate the difference between campaigning and governing. Oddly this is a man who still thinks that his capacity to captivate swooning crowds with his stirring rhetoric is sufficient — in and of itself — to persuade Americans to revamp 1/6 of the nation’s economy.

Yet, to govern is to choose, and to date, as evidenced by his willingness to outsource the crafting of the stimulus and cap and trade bills to his party’s congressional left wing, Obama has been missing in action in terms of exerting some control or establishing some boundaries over the sausage making process.

The results have been predictable. The stimulus has neither stemmed rising unemployment nor stimulated the economy, but rather, has set in motion a cascade of bad faith between President Obama and the American public. With absolutely nothing to show for depleting our national Treasury by over 3/4 of a trillion dollars, he has now finally squandered his good will.

Obama oddly seems to think that his detachment from the legislative process is a regal virtue. Yet, since he has chosen to remain uninvolved in the legislative process, as myriad versions of his health care proposal work their way through the various committees of both the House and the Senate, Obama cannot say with any confidence which iteration of the bill is reflective of his wishes. This has led to the anomalous and politically untenable situation where most Americans don’t know the details of Obama’s health care plan and sadly, neither does Obama.

Created and succored by an adoring, compliant media, the myth of Obama as an above-the-fray transcendent figure bringing recalcitrant parties together was reaped to fruition on the campaign trail, but this iconography has served him ill as President. All of Obama’s talk of “crisis” in connection with our “broken” health care system is fomented. Since he is so dependent on his rhetorical skills, and so unaware of their limitations, Obama has failed to realize that most Americans with existing private insurance plans see no compelling need to explode the existing system, with all its attendant imperfections, in favor of having their health care delivered by the same folks who run Amtrak, the Post Office and have exhibited such dereliction in disbursing stimulus funds to all those “shovel ready” projects in a timely manner.

Yet Obama displays an obliviousness to this reality. Instead, he persists with his talk of “false choices”, establishing unreasonable deadlines for the plan’s completion, and by issuing his tiresome non sequiturs, the most notable of which is that the only way to resuscitate the economy is to “fix” a health care system that isn’t broken by expending another trillion dollars on a universal scheme that most Americans oppose and which the CBO says is fiscally unsustainable.

The “Hope and Change” train inevitably derailed on health care when it was forced to square all the noble sounding and multitudinous promises, with the reality of its preliminary $1+ trillion price tag. This is why at his press conference last Wednesday, Obama was reduced to mouthing the same platitudes that may have served him so well on the campaign trail, but when offered in response to tough questions about choices and scarcity under his plan, left him looking like he was hawking a Ron Popeil gadget. But wait! There’s more… Everyone will get better health care and at a lower cost — and it will be paid for by taxing only “The Rich.” No sentient voter who watched this display of presidential detachment from reality believed a word he was saying.

After the stimulus and cap and trade fiascos, with his health care proposal, Obama has come to the well for a third time, and insists that the bill be passed with the same alacrity as the stimulus. Yet due to his squandered credibility, it should come as no surprise, that no one is buying the health care plan that he and his fellow Democrats are selling.

In terms of his credibility, Obama crossed the Rubicon with the stimulus. This explains why a healthy skepticism on the part of voters now greets his every pronouncement on the virtues of his radical alteration of our health care system.

If Obama’s political strategy seems increasingly detached from fiscal and economic reality and at odds with public sentiment, it is because, blissfully unaware of his diminished standing, he is reading from the same script that has reliably served him so well on the campaign trail. But the gig is up. The stimulus debacle has permanently tarnished the halo of the New Messiah. The political splendor of Obama as a transcendent political figure has dissipated, as Americans conclude, that the words of the silver-tongued rhetorical magician are just that — words.