Monday, April 02, 2012

Defending The Mandate

Ian Welsh has an interesting post at his place titled, “Is the individual mandate really the hill progressives want to die on?” You can go read it for yourself; which I recommend because his writing is almost always worth your time. I don’t agree with him entirely, but…

I would not have not brought him to your attention if I did not think he had a point, of course, and a partial answer to his question lies in the apparent fact that I have not heard the subject mentioned even one time in President Obama’s campaign speeches. Biden has opined that the Court is going to uphold the mandate, but that’s Joe Biden. He says a lot of things.

It’s hard to figure out why the Democratic Party as a whole would want to defend something that is viewed with disfavor by 70% of the voters they are wooing. It’s probably more than that, because that's the percentage of total voters, and Obama loyalists probably love the damned thing merely because it was signed into law by Obama. He could sign a bill outlawing apple pie and motherhood and his loyalists would cheer wildly and declaim how wonderful the bill was.

In the comments following that post Ian says that he believes Obama will have a second term, so it seem the progressives are not actually going to “die on that hill,” but how ludicrous is it that Obama’s signal legislative achievement of “health care reform” depends upon a factor that is almost universally unpopular and that is quite possibly unconstitutional?

2 comments:

  1. what gets me is that if 70% of voters don;t like something, they press ahaead anyway. Kinda shows how out of touch they are with the population they are supposed to be representing. But of course, we know that some constituencies are more equal than others, so why bother with the peons...

    I could go on, but only Jayhawk gets to write long posts...

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  2. Anonymous12:48 PM

    Obama's not a progressive. What I'm finding amazing is all the progressives defending the individual mandate and making a big deal out of it. They're tying themselves to a boat anchor, by defending something the public hates and which is also bad policy.

    Ian

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