Obamacare and the politics of deception
Hence, the noble lie. Liberals deplore but cannot disregard a fundamental political reality: Americans don’t know or want what’s good for them. So many people suffer from correctable failings, Michelle Obama told campaign audiences in 2008, because our country is “just downright mean.” If the selfish, shortsighted voters are to be brought around to embrace the only remedy, the liberal agenda, liberal polemicists need to portray its benefits in maximal terms while insisting its costs are minimal or even negative. The only “price” people will pay is to enjoy more and more benefits. In order to get Americans to institute — little by little, but ultimately in its entirety — a Scandinavian safety net, one must assure them every step of the way that its benefits won’t require anything resembling Scandinavian taxes or regulations.
In his 2007 Iowa speech, Obama said Democrats could form a “new majority” by reaching out to voters “who’ve lost trust in their government, but want to believe again.” As has been the case since Obama appeared on the national scene, this assessment reflects a strategic ambiguity. Is he speaking about policy substance, the governing process, or both? People could have lost trust, that is, in government’s capacity to acquit its responsibilities effectively, including the social-welfare responsibilities that account for most of modern government’s workload. It may be, however, that people have lost trust in the political process because politicians — in their dealings with one another and with the public — are strident, duplicitous, and evasive, rather than conciliatory, forthright, and accountable.
Ideally, the substantive problem and the procedural problem turn out to be the same problem. This is the central premise of Obamaism. During the first press conference following his 2009 inauguration, the president characterized his approach to congressional Republicans as being “consistently civil and respectful.” That press conference concentrated on the urgent needs manifest in a city the president had just visited, Elkhart, Ind., “a place that has lost jobs faster than anywhere else in America.” Obama’s “bottom line” was the distress in Elkhart and similarly afflicted communities around the country, which meant “I can’t afford to see Congress play the usual political games.” The cessation of political games sounds like a procedural objective, but Obama made clear that he would judge whether Congress, especially its Republicans, had gotten serious by the substantive standard of passing a stimulus bill with provisions he wanted. As in the televised “Bipartisan Meeting on Health Reform,” held in February 2010, with Democratic legislators on one side of the table, Republicans on the other, and the president between them moderating the discussion and exploring points he considered important, Obama wanted to have it both ways, to be an umpire and captain of one of the teams.
The hope is that civil and respectful policy debates, ones that tell Americans what they need to hear instead of what they want to hear, will leave voters ever more favorably disposed to assigning new responsibilities to government, confining the arguments to technical details about delivery and financing. But the category of what people need to hear seems to include nothing that would alert them to the prospect that implementing the liberal agenda might incur significant difficulties, costs, and dangers. Rather, what people need to hear includes everything — but only as much as — liberal politicians and publicists want to tell them.
So, throughout the 2008 campaign, Obama made a “firm pledge”: “No family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase. Not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital-gains taxes, not any of your taxes.” The problem with exempting 97 percent of American households from any federal tax increase is that it makes it impossible to pay for: 1) the expensive obligations baked in the cake when Obama took office in 2009; 2) the expensive obligations government has taken on since then, Obamacare chief among them; and 3) the expensive obligations sure to be added to existing ones the next time Democrats have the power to enact them.
After winning reelection, the term-limited president had the opportunity of a lifetime to tell people what they needed to hear instead of what they wanted to hear. With the fiscal-cliff deal of January 2013, however, he responded by making his reckless campaign promise of 2008 even more reckless, agreeing to exempt not 97 percent of Americans from federal tax increases, but more than 99 percent. And he made this deal, which confined higher income-tax rates to individuals making more than $400,000 and to families making more than $450,000, despite enjoying “overwhelming leverage” against Republicans, as liberal columnist Jonathan Chait lamented, given that all the Bush income-tax-rate cuts from 2001 were set to expire.
Liberals rely on bait-and-switch tactics because they fear the results of describing their agenda clearly and candidly to voters, who can’t handle the truth. Even an elementary truth, such as the proposition that improving health care will cost money rather than save money, must be denied over and over, lest don’t-tread-on-me rubes start asking awkward questions about how much improving health care is going to cost and where the money will come from. Once a policy such as Obamacare is enacted and implemented, making the switch means admitting the obvious, and then claiming it’s so obvious — “everyone always knew” it would cost money and disrupt existing health-care arrangements — that it doesn’t really qualify as a switch. The villains in this story are not the liberals who spoke incontestable untruths when political circumstances called for telling people what they wanted to hear. The villains are conservatives who complain about the deceits by commission and omission.
As Obama’s diffidence about raising taxes suggests, however, bait-and-switch liberalism poses difficulties of its own. Once people have been accustomed to expecting benefits, they can be counted on to demand more of them. This is the basis for New Republic editor Noam Scheiber’s defense of Obamacare against liberals who complain America really needs a Medicare-for-all, single-payer system. Obamacare’s virtue is that it’s a “deceptively sneaky way” to hasten the arrival of single-payer, he says, since its shortcomings will create an “organized constituency” with “a whole set of grievances to get exercised about.” The hysterical, prevaricating tea-party zealots who denounced Obamacare as a step to something much bigger were basically right, in other words.
People can be relied on to demand more government benefits without prodding, but not to demand the taxes those benefits will require. What the people most need to hear is also what liberal opinion- and lawmakers need to avoid telling them: Benefits correspond to burdens, so higher benefits will require heavier burdens. Liberalism has advanced by relying on people to get the hint, without the vulgar necessity of anyone’s spelling it out. Social insurance payroll taxes, for example, grew from 2 percent of earned income in 1937 to 15.3 percent today (16.2 percent for families making more than $250,000) because cutting benefits was unthinkable, which made increasing taxes, some two dozen times, the only realistic, pragmatic choice. But there are only 100 percentage points of anything, which means the politics of raising payroll taxes from 15.3 percent to 20 or 25 percent will be much more difficult than going from 2 percent to 15.3.
The keys to bait-and-switch liberalism are: a) serial responsibility, so that the people who do the baiting are not the ones who do the switching; and b) plausible deniability, so that those still on the scene who did the baiting can claim, if anyone asks, that they never anticipated or intended the subsequent switching. Either the welfare state will need to be scaled back, or taxes will need to be raised on Americans making less — much less — than $250,000, but those unpleasant necessities will be confronted on some future president’s watch.
Similarly, the first Supreme Court decision to uphold affirmative action in private employment, Steelworkers v. Weber (1979), saw the majority argue that the 1964 Civil Rights Act’s fundamental concern was with the “plight of the Negro in our economy” and “the problem of opening opportunities for Negroes.” That being the case, the law’s prohibition of racial discrimination in employment practices gave no protection to white employees who were denied advancement opportunities given to blacks with less seniority.
A dissenting opinion by Justice William Rehnquist quoted two of the senators (Clifford Case, a New Jersey Republican, and Joseph Clark, a Pennsylvania Democrat) who guided the bill to passage. In a memorandum refuting those senators who said the bill would result in preferential treatment for racial minorities, they stated that the sections concerned with employment “would have no effect on established seniority rights. . . . [An employer] would not be obliged — or indeed permitted — to fire whites in order to hire Negroes, or to prefer Negroes for future vacancies, or, once Negroes are hired, to give them special seniority rights at the expense of the white workers hired earlier.” Both men were out of politics by the time Weber was decided. Hubert Humphrey, the senator who promised to eat the pages of the bill if anyone could show it would authorize discrimination against whites, had died the year before.
The interesting and prospectively important thing about the speed with which Obamacare’s contradictions have become apparent is that the executive and legislators crucial to its enactment — Obama, Harry Reid, and Nancy Pelosi, in particular — are still in office. The politicians responsible for the switching, that is, are the same ones who did the baiting, not their successors. “At the end of the day,” President Obama recently told The New Yorker, “we’re part of a long-running story. We just try to get our paragraph right.” But the Obama paragraph will not be finished for almost three more years. Republicans will do themselves and their country a service by urging voters to ponder the contrast between the sentences about Obamacare that appeared early in the paragraph, and the very different ones being written today.
— William Voegeli, a senior editor of the Claremont Review of Books, is the author of The Pity Party: A Mean-Spirited Diatribe Against Liberal Compassion, to be published this year. This article was adapted from the March 10, 2014, issue of National Review.
http://www.nationalreview.com/node/372344/print
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