How to Hide a Train Wreck

He’s the “idea man”. You know the type. The guy who’s always spouting off grand ideas on how to run things, or “fix” what’s broken; full of “solutions”, but never actually part of the implementation of those solutions. In their own minds, they are too brilliant to get their hands dirty with the nuts and bolts of making things work. The glory of their genius should be enough to win the accolades of their peers; the actual heavy lifting is beneath them and left up to lesser mortals. In reality, most good ideas are fairly obvious, it’s the effective implementation that often requires true genius.

It would appear we have elected an “idea man” to the highest office in the land. In possibly the best time to make an announcement you hope won’t be heavily scrutinized, the administration announced just before the long holiday weekend that a major portion of Obamacare is being delayed for a year. The employer mandate portion of the bill is being delayed until 2015, which coincidentally comes just after 2014, when the next national elections occur. Yeah, it’s what you think. Democratic strategists have spent the last several months looking at polling data and focus groups determining what the effects of Obamacare will be on the next election, and the decision has been made that a train wreck will not be helpful. Universal healthcare sounds like a wonderful idea, who would be against that? But the actual implementation of it in a country this big, this freedom oriented, by this collection of crooks and clowns, remains dubious.

Winning elections is always part of what is important to politicians of any stripe, but when John McCain lost momentum by suspending his campaign to focus on the financial crisis and Barack Obama chose not to follow suit, a new extreme strategy was uncovered in Washington… campaigning to the exclusion of governing. Likewise, in Obama’s second election, even the charade of governing was eschewed in favor of the campaign trail. Recent revelations about Benghazi, and the IRS targeting of conservative groups show just how devoted to this strategy the administration was. It was hoped that with no reelection hopes in the future, the President would begin, well, being President, doing the work he’s paid to do; but apparently he continues to be more devoted to his ideas than the actual doing of the thing.

So, like a magician who somehow can make the Empire State Building disappear, the President hopes to pull off an Obamacare vanishing act until after the midterm elections. You may be a skeptic, but this machine is skilled at illusions, and has only been defeated once, that being the last midterms. We keep expecting this all to catch up with him eventually, but sans an alternative beyond the tired old choices the Republicans continue to offer up, the next election may just boil down to “the devil you know is better than the other devil you know”, as all the reasons not to vote the status quo are downplayed and obscured.

IMHO: The world is always looking to invent a better mousetrap, but Obamacare is the Rube Goldberg solution to the healthcare problem. It’s total absence of elegance, its convoluted procedures and complicated record keeping requirements, all point, at best, to an awkward giant bureaucracy bungling a difficult issue with a one-size fits all monstrosity; or at worst a train wreck intended to fail and then be saved at the last moment by a metamorphosis to the single-payer system Barack Obama wanted all along, but would never have passed muster in the democratic process. Either way, universal healthcare has proven to be not only Obama’s achilles heel, but Hillary Clinton’s as well. Time will tell whether it continues to be so. As much as the Democrats talk about embracing Obamacare, few seem willing to even stand in close proximity. If the Supreme Court’s validation, the Pelosi “pass it so you can see what’s in it”, and even the sugar coated front end of Obamacare has in any way changed the public’s disdain for this ramrodded Leviathan, you can’t tell it by the Democrats attempt to make it disappear until 2015. Train wrecks, after all, make bad politics.