Ken Berwitz

Richard Cohen of the Washington Post has written a pompous, arrogant and not particularly accurate column about the health care legislation currently stalled in congress.  You can read the whole thing by clicking here.  Or you can read the last half or so of it with my comments in blue, which are below.  Your call:

In our poll-driven culture it might seem strange for a president to attempt something that's somewhat unpopular but merely right. After all, the health care bill has almost no near-term benefit for anyone who votes. Its immediate beneficiaries are the uninsured, consisting of the poor and vulnerable, and the young and delusionally invincible. As a voting bloc, they largely don't.  You think it’s right?  Well I don’t, and most of the country agrees with me.  But keep going…..

The rest of America looks at the bill and shudders. It seems to promise nothing but hardship. The aged have Medicare and most workers have insurance of some sort or another. Sure, many fear losing what they now have and they rightly hate insurance companies, but they seem to prefer their existing plans to what they have been told will be a program run by sullen former Soviet bureaucrats. Opt out and you will be liquidated.  What a crock of bull droppings.  The aged are scared about the 500 billion dollar drop in Medicare funding and the perfectly understandable assumption that it will result in rationing their health care.  A great many people do not hate insurance companies, even if you and the DC elite you hobnob with think otherwise.  And no one I have spoken to on either side of this issue doubts it will be run by bureaucrats – because it will.  Not even a nice try.

As with almost everything else the Obama administration has attempted, the benefits of health insurance reform either are invisible to the monumentally important television camera or are promised for a future time. No one can see savings -- either to the health system or the economy in general -- not because they are fictitious, but because they are unfilmable.  If there were savings, I’d agree with you.  But let’s get to the “savings” you are claiming and see.

It is the same with auto companies that did not disappear, a financial system that did not crater, and jobs that were retained along with a rate of joblessness that recently has been reduced.  Er, in a very real sense, auto companies taken over by the government have disappeared, and the people know it.  Maybe that’s why Ford – which didn’t take a dime from Obama & Co., is the only US automaker now showing a profit.  The financial system is in terrible shape – how do you define cratering anyway?  Saved jobs are not quantifiable so you can say anything you want about them and no one can prove you’re wrong – any more than you can prove you’re right.  But my favorite line is the one about joblessness being reduced.  It was 8.1% when the “stimulus package” was enacted, and went up to 10.1%.  The “reduction” to 9.7%, therefore, is from the increased joblessness which occurred under Obama’s legislation. In the real world, joblessness under Obama didn't drop to 9.7%, it rose to 9.7%.  Your claim that this is a reduced figure is ridiculous bordering on idiotic.

As anyone in TV can tell you, it is impossible to film a reduction in the joblessness rate or a bank that's saved -- "before" and "after" look identical -- or, for that matter, teachers who were not laid off because their school system got funds from the stimulus package. These are the visual equivalent of the sound made by the tree that falls in the forest that no one hears. There's nothing to show. The Iraq War will not end with Obama on the deck of an aircraft carrier, wallowing in patriotic kitsch. The picture will simply go dark. This is a PR dilemma and, for Obama, a political catastrophe.  For exactly the same reasons, how do you know that any of this happened?  You don’t, do you?  Let's have a change of pace and talk real, ok?

Great presidents lead. In a sense, Lincoln "rammed" through the Emancipation Proclamation just as FDR "rammed" through Lend-Lease, Truman "rammed" through desegregation of the military and Lyndon Johnson "rammed" the Civil Rights Act down the throat of a gagging South. These might be considered more dramatic issues than mundane health care, I grant you -- but grant me an exception for someone putting off doctor visits because he or she can't afford to be sick. To that person, this bill is as dramatic as the difference between sickness and health -- the great divide of mankind.  On this one we mostly agree.

The baleful fact is that the country suffers from a surfeit of democracy -- a gazillion interest groups, a gazillion blogs, a gazillion talk shows and all of them insisting on transparency so a gazillion eyes peer over the shoulders of politicians. The black but necessary art of politics shies from the sun. Little gets done. Backrooms have been turned into rec rooms and meetings are seminars. We are doomed. Worse, we are bored.  The country suffers from a surfeit of democracy?  Yep, ObamaCare would pass a lot faster in Cuba, wouldn’t it?  Is that what you want?  Trust me, there are dozens and dozens and dozens of countries in the world whose citizens would weep with joy if they had our "surfeit of democracy".

Google does not tell the whole story. It fails to answer what's wrong with the old belief -- a virtual childhood mantra -- that "majority rules"? It was never "supermajority rules," and the presidency was never intended as a weather vane, turning this way and that on the slight breeze of the latest poll. Lead and the people will -- or will not -- follow. Either way, ram the damn thing, Mr. President. Ram it!  I will avoid the 100 or so cheap shots available to me from those last two sentences.  And I'm sure that if Ms. Obama reads this blog she will be relieved by my restraint.