Jon Chait was so in awe of Obama's commanding awesomeness that he described the healthcare summit as follows:
President Obama is so much smarter and a better communicator than
members of Congress in either party. The contrast, side by side, is
almost ridiculous.
Update: Good example of what I'm talking about: Lamar
Alexander contradicts Obama, says that the Congressional Budget Office
found that premiums would rise under the Senate's plan. Obama points
out, correctly, that Alexander is just wrong.
But most the time, this is like watching Lebron James play
basketball with a bunch of kids who got cut from the 7th grade
basketball team. He's treating them really nice, letting his teammates
take shots and allowing the other team to try to score. Nice try on
that layup, Timmy, you almost got it on. But after a couple minutes I
want him to just grab the ball and dunk on these clowns already.
Hmm - let's watch that dunk again on videotape! The AP Fact Check ran the transcript and concluded that both Obama and Alexander were correct but misleading.
James Taranto explains Chait to the rest of us:
The Great Condescender
No one holds a candle to Barack Obama when it comes to making smart liberals feel superior.
...
Chait actually makes two distinct claims about Obama: that he has a
superior intellect and that he is a superior "communicator." The first
claim could be true, although it is far from indisputable. But the
second claim is so absurd as to be delusional.
Obama has spent the past year trying to sell Americans on ObamaCare.
He has failed utterly, as Podhoretz notes. Now, maybe Chait is right
that opposition to ObamaCare is a product of stupidity. Maybe ObamaCare
would be popular if a majority of Americans were as brilliant as
Jonathan Chait. But in a democratic republic, elections are not limited
to the elect. Shockingly, half of all Americans have below-average IQs.
They vote too.
By no imaginable standard can a politician be considered a great
"communicator," or even an adequate one, if he is unable to persuade
voters of average-or-below intelligence to back his policies.
I think maybe Mr. Taranto is being a bit unfair here. After all, on his side Chait's Great Communicator only had the White House bully pulpit, Congressional chairman, leading academics, and NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN, MSNBC, the NY Times, and the LA Times. Sarah Palin had a Facebook page, Glenn Beck had a television show, and Rush Limbaugh had a radio show, so really - how could Obama hope to break through?
Mr. Chait leaves us with other puzzles in his defense of the Great Communicator. I like this from the lead of his explanation of "Why You Can't Talk Discuss Health Care With The GOP":
Most of the Republicans have relied upon scripted talking points and
generalized denunciations of big government and a "government
takeover." Numerous Democrats in the room have explained why it's not
possible to ban insurance companies from discriminating against those
with preexisting conditions without also covering everybody and
subsidizing those who afford it. (Short answer: people would just game
the system, going without insurance until they get sick.)
Wait a second! Mr. Chait may have forgotten, but back in the endless Democratic primaries we sat through debate after debate in which Obama argued that mandates were not necessary. And he won both the nomination and the election! Was Obama an idiot conservative back then, or a disingenuous liar? And whence sprang any sort of a public mandate for these new mandates?
The Great Communicater shared his new-found philosophy about mandates at the summit:
When I was young, just got out of college, I had to buy
auto insurance. I had a beat-up old car. And I won’t name the name of
the insurance company, but there was a company — let’s call it Acme
Insurance in Illinois. And I was paying my premiums every month. After
about six months I got rear-ended and I called up Acme and said, I’d
like to see if I can get my car repaired, and they laughed at me over
the phone because really this was set up not to actually provide
insurance; what it was set up was to meet the legal requirements. But
it really wasn’t serious insurance.
Now, it’s one thing if you’ve got an old beat-up car that you can’t
get fixed. It’s another thing if your kid is sick, or you’ve got breast
cancer.
As of today the State of Illinois requires drivers to have third party liability in order to register their car; as a believer in regulatory creep, I doubt they had a broader requirement including collision back in the 80's, when a young man drove a beater from New York to take his job as a community organizer in Chi-town.
So what does this anecdote from the Great Communicator tells us? Well, it might tell us he is as dumb as a bag of rocks for not understanding the difference between liability and collision insurance.
But let's give him the benefit if the doubt! I am trying to think like a Lib here, so bear with me - the moral of the story seems to be that even Barack Obama, future editor of the Harvard Law Review and President of the United States, found simple insurance decisions utterly mystifying and had no idea what he had actually purchased.
Now, that flies in the face of the Illinois injunction to "Understand what you are buying. Ask for a detailed explanation in layman’s terms". Furthermore, despite his utter confusion Obama apparently blundered to the common (and thriftier) conclusion, since no one buys collision on a junker.
However, months later he realized that paying more for collision would have been a great idea, so history is re-written. It is now due to ACME's rapaciousness that they are unwilling to right this wrong and write him a check. And they laughed! Surely Chait can hear the racial overtones there! After the laughter died they should have explained to the college grad that he could file a third-party claim against the other driver, assuming Obama was not at fault, but that also may have been too confusing.
Well. If even Obama can be duped by greedy insurers into saving his money and taking a sensible risk, what hope do the rest of us have? Surely we need these new health insurance mandates to make sure both that we buy policies and that the policies we buy have everything we need, not just everything we (stupidly think we) want.
This is classic, generic Democratic paternalism - people can't be trusted to make their own decisions and they certainly should not be expected to endure the consequences of those decisions.
Young Barack should never have been allowed to buy liability-only insurance that didn't cover damage to his junker. Barack, Nancy and Harry will protect us from our own deplorable decision making on the health care front.
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