The president acknowledged as much this month in an interview with Charlie Rose for CBS. When asked about the biggest mistake of his first term, he replied it was his belief that “this job was just about getting the policy right. And that’s important. But the nature of this office is also to tell a story to the American people that gives them a sense of unity and purpose and optimism, especially during tough times.”
To his credit, Obama has been telling a much better story over the past several months about the challenges ahead and why he deserves a second term. “We can either settle for a country where a shrinking number of people do really well, while a growing number of Americans barely get by,” he declares in his new campaign message, “or we can restore an economy where everyone gets a fair shot, everyone does their fair share, and everyone plays by the same set of rules.”
But the problems of health-care reform were not just about selling it — they were substantive as well.
There was no way to tell the story of why the government couldn’t negotiate prices for drugs with the big drug companies, the way the Department of Veterans Affairs already does, without admitting either that the administration was buying off the pharmaceutical industry or that the industry was buying off the administration. There was no way to explain why Americans who saw how much their parents or grandparents liked Medicare couldn’t have at least one option not controlled by the insurance industry — without admitting that the administration had made a deal with the industry that guaranteed it 30 million new customers with no government competition. As Ron Suskind reported in his book “Confidence Men,” that decision ended any possibility of a “public option” a year before the president announced, without explanation, that the public option had died on the operating table.
Whereas the House, under the leadership of Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), put forward a sensible health-care bill in the early days of the new administration, the White House and congressional Democrats ultimately crafted a bill whose greatest benefits would become apparent only years later, giving Republicans all the time in the world to galvanize public opinion against it. Democrats frequently point out that most of the elements of the law are extremely popular, even though the law as a whole remains unpopular. They’re absolutely right. But that’s like saying people pick a spouse based on the person’s nose, mouth, shoulders, hair, job, personality and earning potential, when in fact it’s the totality of the person that either does or doesn’t make our hearts flutter.
One of the most popular elements of the health-care law, and the one that matters most to middle-class Americans, is the end to insurance companies’ ban on people with “preexisting conditions.” That part of the law came online in 2010 for children, an enormous achievement. But our bodies generally start falling apart in our 40s and 50s (trust me on that), and nothing could have been more important for the success of the legislation — and the party and president who made it the law of the land — than for Obama to have been able to pronounce as he signed the bill, “With this stroke of my pen, never again will any American ever see the words from an insurance company, ‘Rejected: preexisting condition.’ ” Try repealing that.
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