I’m really liking this “new” President Obama. He is clear, concise, accurate, and confrontational. He’s meeting the nonsense head on. I feel like he has been too blah for too long on too many subjects. I like this forthrightness.
Obama explained, again, that the budget is held up because of the Affordable Care Act (ACA or “Obamacare”) and that House Republicans are holding the government hostage. He went on to describe that the health insurance exchanges that the ACA made possible go into effect today. And that so far the only issue they have seen is that the web site was so slow because it had over a million visitors before 7:00am! Even when you account for all the journalists who were experimenting and haters that were trying to find problems, that’s still a remarkable amount of site visits. (I wonder if there was any kind of DoS attack or other automated site visits attempting to bring it down for political reasons?)
I’m a big fan of the ACA – how can you not like adding insurance for previously uninsured while not changing the private insurance that is already in effect? (And even if you don’t care about other people not having insurance, if you say that you don’t want your taxes to pay for somebody else’s health care, well then you are too naive to realize you are already are; it is cheaper to pay through insurance than through government subsidies for emergency care.)
For a moment, let’s pretend that the contentious issue is not the ACA but is instead something we’ll call Grapes and the parties are named Bob and Frank. Bob and Frank are driving down the road and Bob wants Grapes but Frank doesn’t – the Grapes are already in the car but they are just arguing over whether they should eat them or throw them out the window. In fact, Bob has already started eating the Grapes while Frank is still arguing that they should go out the window. They know they are running out of gas and they both know they need the gas but Frank decides that since he still doesn’t want the Grapes in the car, the best solution is to let the car run out of gas. He’d rather be broken down on the side of the road than in a car with Grapes. That’s how stupid the House Republicans are for conflating two unrelated issues and driving the car into the ditch for not getting everything they want.
It reminds me of the Jimmy Kimmel joke from when he hosted the White House Correspondents dinner:
You know President Obama wanted to move the dinner to the Kennedy Center this year but the Republicans wanted to keep it here at the Hilton so they compromised and here we are at the Hilton.
So I believe the Republicans are used to getting their way, even when in the minority. And now they are in the unfamiliar place of not getting their way they and their childlike obstinacy to yielding at all is the result.
The question remains: what next? And my prediction is some fake compromise that will mean no change to the ACA and yet will allow Republicans to save face. I know when children get into a state where they have dug in their heels so deep that they can’t get out without a full personality collapse you need to give them something to help them along. I don’t know what it will be, but I predict Saturday (4 days from now), the Democrats will offer something trivial and the Republicans will accept and then they will both be able to declare victory. Except in this case, it will be the Democrats who actually emerge on the positive side of a compromise. Looking forward to that result and to more of this newly energized President.