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US Tea Party Political Activists National Assembly
US Tea Party Political Activists National Assembly
Failure of Failures
Could Obamacare end up as America’s worst domestic-policy disaster ever?
By Charles C. W. Cooke, The National Review
Indulge me if you will, and join me in imagining that Obamacare has taken the calamitous path of the Hindenburg and ended up as little more than a smoldering warning against hubris. Imagine, that is, that enrollment rates have remained dangerously low; that the risk pools consist largely of the elderly and the sick; that the insurance companies, unable to operate on the magical thinking of which the White House is so fond, are being forced either to get out of the market completely or to raise premiums dramatically; and that skittish Democrats have started to run away — first calling weakly for fixes, then hinting at more, and then barely resisting the temptation to follow the trail of the pitchforks and nullify the president’s signature achievement. Imagine, in other words, that things are bad.
Now answer me this: If such a scenario were actually to come to pass — and, of course, it most certainly has not as of yet — how serious a failure will we judge it to be? Will we see it as a hiccup? Will we claim that it is typical for a second term? Or will we consider it to be a calamity of historical proportions? Personally, I would plump for the lattermost: In my view, if Obamacare were to fail hard, it could well come to be seen as the most catastrophic domestic-policy enterprise of the last century.
I do not say that flippantly. The last 100 years have certainly thrown up a few turkeys — Prohibition, the 1933 National Industrial Recovery Act, and the short-lived Medicare Catastrophic Coverage Act of 1988 all come to mind — and yet Obamacare stands out as being potentially even worse because, as David French recently noted, it has the disadvantage of being unprecedently partisan. This, after all, is a law that bears a president’s name. This is to say that if it fails, not only will it hurt a swath of innocent citizens — as many other messy initiatives have — but it will also discredit for a generation the worldview of its architects. And this, as Joe Biden might say, is a “big f***ing deal.”
Now, even in the extremely gloomy case that I outlined above, it is unlikely that its collapse would prove as deleterious to national harmony as was, say, Prohibition. But while the Eighteenth Amendment was a fiasco per se, its failure was at least broad-based. Prohibition boasted overwhelming public support, bipartisan enthusiasm, and a trans-regional acquiescence that was rare for the era. In the House, Democrats voted 146–64 in favor, while Republicans voted 137–62 in favor; in the Senate, Democrats voted 36–12 in favor, while Republicans voted 29–8 in favor. And 46 of the 48 states voted to ratify (two abstained). When the Depression made Prohibition unpopular, the parties were split as to what they might do about the crisis, with Herbert Hoover famously vacillating and FDR pouncing on the chance to run on a platform of repeal. Yet the manner in which the experiment had been originally agreed upon meant that one could not draw easy conclusions as to who, ultimately, was to blame. America had been swept up in hysteria, and it had frankly gotten it wrong — not because of the folly of one team, but because of the ugly thinking of a regrettable moment in time. Obamacare does not enjoy this luxury.
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