Sen. Charles Schumer (N.Y.) has come out and said in the open what I’ve been privately been told by Democrats for several years and have heard repeatedly if the topic turned to politics during my current special one year national and Canadian tour in my non-writing incarnation: when President Barack Obama opted to use his (and his party’s) political chits to first tackle healthcare reform, it cost them greatly in terms of their political clout. And no matter how successful ObamaCare may fare as a program in coming years, the timing was a big, fat political mistake:
Democrats made a strategic mistake by passing the Affordable Care Act, Sen. Charles Schumer (N.Y.), the third-ranking member of the Senate Democratic leadership, said Tuesday.
Schumer says Democrats “blew the opportunity the American people gave them” in the 2008 elections, a Democratic landslide, by focusing on healthcare reform instead of legislation to boost the middle class.
“After passing the stimulus, Democrats should have continued to propose middle class-oriented programs and built on the partial success of the stimulus,” he said in a speech at the National Press Club.
He said the plight of uninsured Americans caused by “unfair insurance company practices” needed to be addressed, but it wasn’t the change that people wanted when they elected Barack Obama as president.“Americans were crying out for an end to the recession, for better wages and more jobs; not for changes in their healthcare,” he said.
He noted that 85 percent of all Americans got their healthcare from either the government, through Medicare or Medicaid, or through an employer.
“So when Democrats focused on healthcare, the average middle class person thought, ‘the Democrats are not paying enough attention to me,’ ” he said.
Schumer’s concession is a striking change of tone from what he said shortly after the passage of the healthcare law, when he predicted that ObamaCare would turn out to be a strong political issue for his party.[The Hill]
But the old quotes from Schumer don’t shock me one bit.
It had just been passed. Democrats were all saying it would be a strong political issue because they fell into a familiar trap for Democrats: they assumed that they way they perceived things was the most logical and intelligent way and that therefore it was a solid political idea. And there was logic in that argument. However, it also didn’t take into account the strength of the conservative entertainment media machine to consistently repeat a concept and make it an ongoing narrative on radio, cable, weblogs and in comments sections. But even the logic or the role of conservative media could not change the fact: it was a strategical mistake.
The bottom line really was that most Americans who voted for Obama didn’t do so thinking, “I can’t wait until George Bush and the Republicans are out so we can finally get some kind of government supported health care!” The vast majority of people who voted for the Dems wanted the GOP out because they believed GOPers and George Bush served big business interests and had utterly decimated the economy due to poor decisions and outright incompetence, and put them in a spot where they felt they were experiencing what their parents and/or grandparents did in America did during the great depression. They feared things were getting worse since they believed the Republicans really didn’t have a clue.
Health care may have been part of what people hoped would happen, but fixing their problems was their biggest hope.
And quite a few problems have been at least partially fixed or improved. But Schumer is (now) correct: the timing was bad and left people who voted for the Democrats who might not have done so except for their disgust and/or alarm at Republican governance getting the impression that once in power the Democrats were like little kids in a candy shop and could not help themselves grabbing for sweets they could finally shove their way in and get.
Many Presidents Democrats and Republicans had sought major reform of health care but were stymied by political foes and entrenched business forces that opposed them. Obama got a version through that is likely to be enduring (unless the Supreme Court changes the “givens.”) But that doesn’t change the fact it did indeed prove to be a strategical blunder, even if this assertion means Schumer or any who dare to voice or write their agreement with him are pilloried by pundits.
A strategical error is a strategical error.
Yes, Mr. Schumer, for all its good intentions and all its current value — and all it may do or set in motion in the future — it has proven to have been was a strategical error.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.