Obamacare: A Payoff to the Most Leftist Groups

The loss of the support of the National Federation of Independent Business for healthcare reform could nicely symbolize the crucial decisions of the first few months of the Obama Administration. First the stimulus, and now healthcare have been written as ideological payoffs to the left-most faction of the president's own party.

Eighteen months ago, the country's largest small business lobby, the National Federation of Independent Business, seemed poised to join the advocates of large healthcare reform. It united with the Service Employees International Union and the American Association of Retired Persons to fund the "Divided We Fail" campaign urging a universal healthcare system. The Divided We Fail website still stands, but its advertisements have vanished from television. The NFIB has resumed the fierce oppositional stance it took 16 years ago against the Clinton administration's plans. When they tell the story of the Obama administration, the loss of the NFIB's support could nicely symbolize the crucial decisions of the first few months. First the stimulus, now healthcare have been written as ideological payoffs to the left-most faction of the president's own party. On the big issues, the president has unnecessarily multiplied the number of his opponents and grossly over-rewarded his core supporters. Imagine this alternative: Suppose the president had done a cheaper one-year stimulus that had cost $400 billion not $800 billion. Suppose he had written a restrained budget for 2010 that did not (as his actual budget does) threaten to overwhelm the country with debt. He'd now have a lot more room to spend money on healthcare! And if liberal Democrats in Congress had objected, he could have muscled them by counter-arguing that they were jeopardizing a once in a lifetime opportunity to insure the uninsured. Then propose a plan that mandates all to buy insurance, that offers subsidies and a connector to help those who cannot afford it,  and that funds the plan (as the Heritage Foundation recommended in 1990!) with a tax on more generous benefits. Omit the surtaxes and payroll taxes that alienate small business. Small business should have been the administration's ally! Omit the so-called public option - that's the left wing's equivalent of abolishing Social Security. Hire Stuart Butler as deputy director of your White House health operation and take care to listen to him. Write a plan that could command 70% public support. Build outward from your base, rather than digging deeper into it. That's what Ronald Reagan did with tax reform in 1986. It's what Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich did together with welfare reform in the 1990s. That's how everything important and enduring gets done. What you're doing now by contrast follows the model for division and failure set by Bill Clinton with healthcare and George W. Bush with Social Security reform. You are tampering with a system vitally important to tens of millions of people. They may be anxious about the system's future, but the large majority of them want to protect what they have now - and fear that change could be for the worse. They have no comprehension of the details of your proposal, no time to study them, and no capacity to analyze them. They will be guided by their representatives, their accepted political leaders, and their trusted policy elites. They will be reassured by unanimity, frightened by division. You've been doing nothing to foster unanimity. Instead, you've been wooing big industry players one by one - as if the most cynical left-wing caricature of capitalist politics actually described reality. ("Big business controls everything - get the manufacturers of top hats and the monocle grinders on your side, and you've won the battle.") There's no question that your Democratic majorities in Congress will pass something by the end of the year. But as things are going, it will be something that could amount to nothing. If you fail to get a substantial reform, don't blame the interest groups, the Republicans, or the inertia of the political system. The culprit will be your own rigidity - and a smallness of spirit that could not grow to equal your opportunities.