Now that the monster known as Obamacare is dead and liberals are crying and gnashing their teeth, there's a bigger question out there: who is Barack Obama?
That last part may be a little too harsh, because it’s clear that there’s at least one thing Barack Obama is fully and fixatedly convinced of: himself. The “opportunity of a lifetime” in health care is, of course, two-fold, because while there’s an ideological opportunity here for the Left to remake the health system — and like it or not, they think for the better — there also emerged a likely divergent political opportunity for Barack Obama to lasso a powerful interest group in the process. Two roads, one leading to Chicago-style politics, with a choice making all the difference.
And that’s the problem for everyone, Right and Left. It’s not “pragmatism” that drives Barack Obama’s agenda. It’s personal, political opportunism, cloaked and advanced in Leftist ideology insofar as it advances the President’s perpetual cult of personality. I don’t doubt that as a disciple of Saul Alinsky, follower of Jeremiah Wright, and colleague of Bill Ayres and Bernadine Dohrn, Obama holds the values of the finge Left. We see that clearly enough in his voting record and rhetoric. But when it comes to the hard choices, Obama is out for Number One, and if that takes saving a piddly 2% on drugs to reward pharmaceuticals for their ObamaCare support and indenture them to an Obama re-election bid, then that’s exactly what he’s going to do — even if he has to bankrupt America in the process, which the bills being contemplated in the House and Senate no doubt would do even without the pharma deal. With a true statesman missing at 1600 Pennsylvania, the health care bill has floundered badly, bearing with it a poisonous and destructive backlash against the American people among Obama hardliners in Congress — a reaction perhaps unparalleled in recent history in its contempt for the American people. It’s a tone fully of the President’s making and against which the President has spent little, if any, political capital to tamp down.
Like many of us tried to say during the campaign, Barack Obama's primary interest is Barack Obama. Where he is pushed to present ideas and positions, he will lean to the left. But he will always try to get someone else to do the heavy lifting. That means that Democrats in Congress will always take the fall for bad policies (such as the stimulus bill) that Americans don't want and are afraid of paying for.
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