Saturday, October 23, 2010

Fixing What Ain't Broke

The Washington Post ran an article yesterday that shed some light on why Democrats are not running on the wonderfulness of “health care reform” they passed last year. In a nutshell, after almost a full year of relentlessly selling it to the public, it remains significantly more unpopular in the public’s view, with 48% thinking it was a bad idea, than popular, with only 32% thinking it a good idea. There’s no point arguing the precise merits of the reform; that 48% thinks it was a bad idea to do it at all.

These numbers are almost precisely the same as numbers that the measure polled during the contentious debate prior to passage of the bill. Even while Congress was in the business of debating the reform, polls were trying to tell Congress that details didn’t really matter, 48% of the country did not want them even doing this at all.

The polls don’t address the “why” of the good idea/bad idea issue, and article goes on to explain that the reform plays in to the Tea Party’s “big government” mantra. I’m not sure that is really the issue, because nowhere near 48% of the general public subscribes to that mantra. I think the issue was and is unpopular simply because it was the wrong issue to address. Jobs and the Main Street economy have been the number one issue, and Congress dealt with the Wall Street economy, and “health care reform.”

It’s rather like you took your car into a shop and told them to repair a blown head gasket in the engine and they ignored that problem and rebuilt the transmission. You would be pretty angry. Yes the transmission did need some work, but the new transmission does you no damned good if the car won’t run because the head gasket is still blown.

The upshot is they made 10 million people happy because they now have health insurance, or will have four years from now if they can afford to pay for it, and they pissed off 30 million people who still don’t have jobs, and another 50 million who are still underemployed and are still worried about losing their jobs. In my book, making 10 people happy while pissing 80 people off is not a winning formula.

So now all that Democrats can run on is an increasingly shrill fear mongering campaign of how badly the Republicans will botch the job if we elect them to run the country. This from the gang that repaired the transmission in my car and left the engine dysfunctional.

Who's calling who a "snake oil salesman" here?

1 comment:

  1. .

    You adhere to strategy of typing as many paragraphs as possible in the hope that some other deluded fool will think you know what you're talking about. “Fixing What Ain’t Broke” is another of your confused missives based on a false premise. It is loosely written without a central theme.

    "So now all that Democrats can run on is an increasingly shrill fear mongering campaign of how badly the Republicans will botch the job if we elect them to run the country."

    A better analogy is you have allowed your father’s finely tuned expensive automobile to be driven into a ditch and totally damaged. The team hired to drag it out of the ditch and repair it, are still in the middle of the job. The mangled remains are still under extensive repair, requiring time, energy and money. You are sitting on the sideline sniveling, whining, bitching, and ‘Monday morning Qbing”.

    What ever the team hired to fix the mess is doing, you can point to what they are not doing and say it is more important. The health care system is broke. The financial system is an organized criminal activity. Both needed direct extensive government involvement to fix.

    You have read an opinion piece and point to, “that 48% thinks it was a bad idea to do it at all.” Which means a majority of the people _DID_ want them to do it.

    The mid-term election will show how adult the voting population in USA really are.

    Ema Nymton
    ~@:o?
    .

    ReplyDelete