Barack Obama has had a bad month but told Barbara Walters that there is nowhere to go but up:
“I’ve gone up and down pretty much consistently throughout,” Obama told ABC’s Barbara Walters in an exclusive interview at the White House. “But the good thing about when you’re down is that usually you got nowhere to go but up.”
Not necessarily. It seems there is no bottom with Congress at only a six percent approval rating in an Economist/YouGov Poll.
With the gridlock caused by Republicans in Congress only likely to get worse with regards to legislation, even if there is an end to the Republican near-automatic blocking of appointees with the change in Senate filibuster rules, it is hard to see how Congress could possible get anywhere near fifty-percent approval. Obama has a far better chance of recovering support if the relaunch of Obamacare is a success.
While some of the factors causing a drop in Obama’s support were his fault, the significance has been exaggerated way out of proportion by Republicans who are not only rooting for failure but doing everything possible to sabotage the Affordable Care Act.Timothy Egan wrote:
This organized schadenfreude goes back to the dawn of Obama’s presidency, when Rush Limbaugh, later joined by Senator Mitch McConnell, said their No. 1 goal was for the president to fail. A CNN poll in 2010 found 61 percent of Republicans hoping Obama would fail (versus only 27 percent among all Americans).
Wish granted, mission accomplished. Obama has failed — that is, if you judge by his tanking poll numbers. But does this collapse in approval have to mean that the last best chance for expanding health care for millions of Americans must fail as well?
Does this mean we throw in the towel, and return to a status quo in which insurance companies routinely cancel policies, deny health care to people with pre-existing conditions and have their own death panel treatment for patients who reach a cap in medical benefits?
The Republican plan would do just that, because they have no plan but to crush the nation’s fledgling experiment. Sometimes they bring up vouchers, or tort reform, or some combination of catchphrases. Here was Sarah Palin, who is to articulate reason what Mr. Magoo is to vision, on the Republican alternative, as she told Matt Lauer:
“The plan is to allow those things that have been proposed over many years to reform a health care system in America that certainly does need more help so that there’s more competition, there’s less tort-reform threat, there’s less trajectory of the cost increases. And those plans have been proposed over and over. And what thwarts those plans? It’s the far left.”
Yes, it is a big and legitimate news story, for a presidency built on technical expertise, that the federal exchange is not working as promised. Ditto Obama’s vow that people could keep their bottom-feeder health care policies.
But where were the news conferences, the Fox News alerts, the parading of people who couldn’t get their lifesaving cancer treatments under the old system? Where was the media attention when thousands of people were routinely dumped once they got sick? When did Republicans in Congress hold an oversight hearing on the leading cause of personal bankruptcy — medical debt?
Obama should not have said people can keep their own insurance without an admission that this will not apply to everyone, even if they will come out ahead by changing plans. The web site problems should never have occurred but web site problems say zero about the goal of ensuring that all Americans have access to purchasing health care coverage which cannot be terminated at the whim of an insurance company should they develop medical problems. Besides, this would not have been an issue if the states had developed their own exchanges as intended. Enrollment under the Affordable Care Act has been going well in many states where a state exchange was developed. This is primarily in blue states, but Kentucky is a notable exception where Republican Governor Steve Beshear went against his party and made Obamacare work in his state. (Correction: Steve Beshear is a Democrat)
He’s an unlikely champion, not least because Kentucky’s two U.S. senators are both implacable opponents of the program.
“I knew if I was going to make a huge difference in the health status of Kentucky, it was going to take some kind of transformational tool to do that, and that’s what the Affordable Care Act is for me,” Beshear, white-haired and greyhound-lean, said as he sat behind a big maple desk in his office. “I think we’ve started something here,” he later added, “that a generation from now you’ll see a very different Kentucky than what you see today.”
Empowered to act without the Legislature’s approval, Beshear became the only Southern governor to embrace a provision vastly expanding Medicaid eligibility and open a state-run exchange for others seeking insurance. He conceded, with a small smile, that it was easier knowing he would never face voters again. “But,” he went on, “I’m convinced that in the end this is not going to [be] a negative political issue.”
He acted, Beshear said, only after independent analysts predicted the healthcare overhaul would inject more than $15 billion into Kentucky’s economy over the next eight years, create about 17,000 new jobs and produce about $800 million in state revenue. “You cannot afford not to do this,” he said he was told.
Obamacare does work when the Republicans don’t actively fight its implementation. Even with all the Republican attempts at sabotage, it appears that the most of the web site problems are being fixed and Obamacare will be running successfully. Of course a program of this complexity won’t work without some glitches, and Republicans will continue to make a lot of noise. Another factor working against Obama is that many people do not realize the risk they were at of losing their insurance in the past.
Hopefully the American people will trust their own experience over the lies from the right wing noise machine. A delay in getting a web site working properly is a minor matter. Once the web site is working and we move into 2014 most Americans will see that they really are either keeping their old insurance or replacing it with better coverage, generally from the same company if they desire, and frequently at a lower cost. They certainly are not being forced to give up their insurance for a government-run plan as many were misled to believe. Some of us will come out behind in terms of dollars spent, but generally the policies will cover more than in the past and have one huge advantage over plans prior to Obamacare–insurance companies will not be able to stop coverage due to medical problems. The real source of people losing their insurance is not Obamacare but the failed system it is replacing. Obamacare is the solution, not the problem.