The Weekly Standard has a great piece this morning about how the Democrats are planning to spin their health care fiasco for the November elections. That's gonna' be quite a job because the public absolutely hates what the Democrats have done to them.President Obama made a lot of promises about the health care takeover which turned out to be nothing but lies. And the Dems in Congress went right along with him -- wheeling and dealing, bribing and bamboozling -- all the way to their lowest popularity levels ever.
And now, in characteristic Obama fashion, the Democrats are "hoping beyond hope" that the public will buy the latest line. It's a strategy which privately acknowledges the groundswell of public opinion to repeal the whole doggone thing but instead asks America -- "Trust us to fix our mistakes."
It'll never work, you say? The health care takeover was just too expensive, too counter-productive, too socialist, too revealing of the Democrats' penchant for lies and larceny?
Well, remember they'll have money for plenty of TV and radio commercials plus the loyalty of the liberal press to make the mainstream "news" programs into Democrat commercials too.
So don't take things for granted. Pass the facts on to your friends and enemies alike. Being played for patsies when the stakes are this high is bad for business, bad for the citizenry and bad for the cause of personal liberty.
Here's some of that Weekly Standard story:
Politico has released a piece that begins as follows: "Key White House allies are dramatically shifting their attempts to defend health care legislation, abandoning claims that it will reduce costs and deficit, and instead stressing a promise to 'improve it.'" This is a truly remarkable sentence. Legislation that the Congressional Budget Office says would cost about $2.5 trillion in its real first decade (2014 to 2023) wouldn't do the one thing that Americans most want out of health-care legislation: cut health care costs. It wouldn't, despite the administration's repeated claims to the contrary, cut deficits. But, on the bright side, it can (allegedly) be improved. That's an amazingly tepid claim to make on behalf of something with Obamacare's price tag.
The truth is that Obamacare cannot be improved. It can only be repealed. It was passed as "comprehensive legislation," and it must be repealed comprehensively...
Politico reports that White House allies' "confidential presentation" (it was leaked to Politico "by a source on the call" on which it was outlined) "concedes that groups typically supportive of Democratic causes," including those under 40, "have not been won over by the plan." Indeed, Rasmussen's latest survey shows that voters in their 30s favor repeal by a 37-point margin (67 to 30 percent), while those voters in their 30s who feel "strongly" (either way) support repeal by the tally of 61 to 17 percent.
Perhaps most tellingly, Politico writes that the presentation's "final page of 'Don'ts' counsels against claiming 'the law will reduce costs and deficit.'" Instead, the presentation advises, "Keep claims small and credible"; "don’t overpromise or 'spin' what the law delivers." Thus, the administration’s central claim from the start – made ad nauseam by everyone from President Obama on down – that Obamacare would somehow reduce health care costs, is apparently just "spin." (This, of course, was recognized by a great many Americans all along.) And now, a $2.5 trillion law that's longer than War and Peace must, incredibly, be defended on the basis of claims that are "small and credible.
