How to Know When Health Care Reform is Dead
Since late last week, my inbox has been flooded with advocacy/fundraising pieces from Planned Parenthood, NOW, NARAL, the Democratic Party, HCAN, and pretty much every other interest group with a dog in the health care fight. Every single one of them has some version of “It’s not over yet!”
That’s how you know it’s over: when the equivalent of Homer Simpson goes chasing after the equivalent of “the pig de resistance” as it goes careening down the hill, covered with dirt, falling into the river, until it finally goes airborne never to return, all the while screaming “It’s just a little slimy, it’s still good!”
Never doubt my capacity to be wrong, but I think heath insurance reform is about as dead as dead can be.
It didn’t have to be this way: the democrats could have come up with a bill that met their campaign promises. What they developed was largely a giveaway to insurance companies. And since that was never going to fly with the voters, they had to twist themselves into all sorts of painful contortions to say make the bill seem like something other than what it is. But look, people aren’t stupid:
[W]e wasted 2009 “negotiating” with bad faith actors like Snowe and Mike Enzi. The tools were available to quickly pass a health care bill, yet Democrats were too incompetent to do so. And on issue after issue, they’ve proven completely ineffective.
THAT’s why the base is sitting things out. They don’t need blogs or MSNBC to tell them that Democrats can’t govern. They already knew that Republicans don’t want to govern, but the Democrats were supposed to be different. And they are, they want to govern, but they can’t. And the voters that worked their asses off to give Democrats the White House and super majorities in Congress are now realizing that it was all for nothing. That all that talk about hope and change was cynical bullshit designed to motivate them. It worked once, but that crowd is learning the art of political cynicism, and it ain’t pretty.
And so we are left with a flying pig.
