Paul Waldman

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Obamacare’s Bad Politics

by Elias Isquith on May 2, 2013

Obamacare

With the implementation of Obamacare soon to really begin in earnest, some conservatives have begun preemptively crowing over what they’re convinced will be a disastrous transition period. Considering they’ve spent the past three years gumming up the bureaucratic works as much as possible, they very well may be right.

But even if they aren’t, the American Prospect’s Paul Waldman worries that the bedtime story liberals tell themselves about Obamacare, that it will soon be just as beloved by the masses as Medicare and Social Security are today — and that Republicans will consequently shy from attacking it head-on — is going to look foolish in hindsight:

One of the biggest problems…is that Obamacare isn’t a single program like Medicare that people can come to love. It’s a whole bunch of pilot programs and new regulations, many of which involve private insurance or existing programs like Medicare and Medicaid, and when people are affected by those changes they won’t necessarily see them as being part of Obamacare…Your relationship with the insurer you choose will certainly be affected deeply by the ACA’s regulations, but most people still won’t understand exactly how.

Among the consequences are that Republicans will be absolutely free to continue to blame every problem anyone has with the health care system on Obamacare, without concern of producing a backlash from the law’s supporters. Compare that to how they talk about Medicare, a program they’ve hated since the moment it was proposed. Because they know how much seniors love their Medicare, they have to pretend they would never harm a hair on the program’s lil’ ole head…

That ridiculous kabuki Republicans are forced into is what protects Medicare from the shivs they’d love to jam into its hide. But nobody is going to shout, “Take your hands off my Obamacare!” because Obamacare isn’t going to be perceived as a thing you have. It’s just a bunch of rules governing how other things run.

I recall this argument being raised a few years ago, back when wild supposition about a bill years away from implementation was still cool. I thought it was probably right then, and still think so now.

It’s certainly a fact of American politics that the public, by and large, has no idea idea how much and what their government does. And when you’ve got a program like Obamacare, one that in so many ways embodies what is called the submerged state, a disconnect between what the public gets and what it thinks it gets — and why! — is highly likely if not outright inevitable.

So let’s stipulate that the public will never conceive of a thing called Obamacare, that Obamacare is a panoply of changes, most of them bureaucratic, that will improve people’s lives to a degree almost inverse to its presence in their consciousness. Next question is easy: why did Democrats put so much at stake for a bill that, just on the political level, is kinda-sorta terrible?

Well, this is where ideology comes in — particularly the fact that America remains very much enthralled to the ideology behind the free market. I know a lot of true-blue market absolutists would find conflating Obamacare with the free market risible; but that’s a product of temporal partisan bickering rather than a true philosophical divide. And while more than a few liberals went overboard, it’s still true that, fundamentally, Obamacare is patterned off of center-right proposals.

Living as we are in a time when, at least among elites, free-market dogma seems immune to the intellectual disfavor you’d expect after the worst financial crisis in 80 years, the prospects for progressive legislation that doesn’t take the form of the submerged state are simply lousy.

To put it simply, what chances could a less market-oriented, more statist plan truly have in an environment where Obamacare, a consummately neoliberal (i.e., liberal ends through conservative means) bill is fast-transformed into the trojan horse with a panel of Dr. Kevorkians inside? Until that question seems like an outlandish, Cassandra-esque hypothetical, the submerged state is probably the best liberals can hope to get.

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The power of negative thinking

by Elias Isquith on November 4, 2011

Negama

Responding to this silly Ben Smith piece — which, with its lack of original reporting and its reliance on unexamined Village clichés, should be seen as a kind of paragon of the Politico genre — Paul Waldman defends the negative campaign:

Finally, it’s important that we keep in mind that there is nothing wrong with being “negative.” It’s OK for a candidate to criticize his/her opponent. If the criticism is accurate, fair, relevant, and not overly personal, then it ought to be part of the debate. Those are the criteria that matter. A race in which both sides only talked about themselves would be both boring and uninformative. It’s perfectly fine for Rick Perry to say that the health-care plan Mitt Romney passed in Massachusetts is incompatible with Republican values. It’s perfectly fine for Mitt Romney to say that Barack Obama’s record of killing terrorist leaders and extricating America from endless wars indicates a troubling lack of unthinking belligerence. And it’s perfectly fine for Barack Obama to say that Mitt Romney seems to shift his positions on issues to suit political expediency. All of those criticisms, whether you find them persuasive or absurd, have at least something to do with what the next presidency will be about.

Because I’m a contrarian curmudgeon, I, of course, like negative campaigning. Or, rather, I find the logic behind complaining about negative campaigns to be so irksome that I find myself internally overcorrecting. There’s just something deeply unappealing to me about the idea that we’re all supposed to get along. It reminds me of families or relationships where there’s never any fighting — things may look serene and perfect on the outside, but, often, underneath the surface percolate some messy, ugly, even downright frightening emotions.

Now, when the public tells pollsters they don’t like negative campaigning, I understand it. The explanation for why they claim to dislike attack ads while, at the same time, clearly finding them often persuasive — campaigns wouldn’t use them if this weren’t the case — is because of the well-worn general rule of thumb that, when it comes to broad measurements of public opinion, not only are The People incoherent, they’re noxious hypocrites to boot! (I think this is more of an indictment of the utility of polls than the public, for what it’s worth.)

But in any event, no one wants to consider themselves self-consciously, willfully negative, so of course they’ll tell a stranger who says they work with a polling firm that No, I Don’t Like Negative Campaigning. What better way to show how mature and reasonable and sophisticated they are? Negative campaigns are overwhelmingly associated with personal attacks — so rejecting them, in the abstract, not only allows one to think of themselves as high-minded, but also as concerned first and foremost with Serious matters like policy. As the unending Herman Cain coverage this week attests, The People are most definitely not more interested in policy than sex or corruption…But so it goes.

What the Village does, however, is to conflate the public’s stated antipathy for negative (read: personal) attacks with a belief that hard-hitting attacks against what one deems to be ill-conceived policy are also not to the public’s liking. Especially if those hard-hitting attacks happen to go against the Village’s preferred course of action — hence terms like “Mediscare” — or the Village’s prejudices about what Real Americans in the Heartland happen to think and believe. Remarkably, it turns out that Real Americans, on the whole, think and believe the same things as those troubadours of the Common Man like Pete Peterson or David Brooks.

Anyway, because of the above, I expect that Obama’s 2012 campaign against Romney, which will be heavy on negative attacks that attempt to tie Mitt’s opaque personal character to his most unpopular policy positions, will be treated by the Village as perhaps the most scurrilous assault on a political figure since Ted Kennedy had the audacity to delineate Robert Bork’s philosophy for an uninformed public. Many pearls will be clutched, many fainting couches will have their upholstery worn thin from repeated usage. But, as Waldman says, people’s first impressions of politicians generally are very hard to change — and people see Obama as the nice dude. (One could argue that the debt-limit ugliness of the summer was the downpayment for this impermeable public perception and that it thus will end up being worth it.)

So Mitt Romney and his fellow travelers might as well suck it up and plan accordingly. If Smith’s piece is anything to go by, however, it appears that they’re still banking on whining.

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