How Democrats lost credibility on health care

Mathew Continetti:

Let's stipulate that Congress may yet pass some sort of health insurance overhaul by the end of the year, that the future in politics is never a straight-line projection from the present, that President Obama is a savvy and charismatic guy, that Democrats control both houses of Congress, and--yadda, yadda, yadda--that the climate for "reform" has never been better. Still: One can't help noticing that the more Obama talks about his health plan, the less the public supports it. Why?

Partly because voters have connected the dots between the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 and Obamacare. They have seen the meager results and huge deficits that the stimulus produced, and can't come up with a good reason to embark on yet another government shopping spree. For the public, the stimulus was bad economic medicine. Now Obama wants it to try another, unapproved experimental drug.

Nor do voters think health care is an urgent problem. The vast majority are satisfied with their insurance and see health coverage as peripheral to larger concerns such as jobs, the economy, and the federal debt. In last week's Wall Street Journal poll, for example, health care ranked third in the list of the public priorities, around where it typically resides.

The big takeaway from the NBC News/Wall Street Journal survey, of course, was that pluralities disapprove of the way Obama is handling "health reform," 46 percent to 41 percent, with 47 percent calling Obama's plan an--uh oh--"bad idea." Buried in the Journal's write-up, though, was the equally bracing news that support for the stimulus has fallen to 34 percent. Only a third of the country, in other words, is willing to say that the recovery plan is doing its job. Meanwhile, many more people--43 percent of the respondents in the Journal poll--say the trillion-dollar-with-interest emergency spending bill was another "bad idea."

They have plenty of reasons to say so. In the months since February 17, when Obama signed the stimulus, the economy has hardly improved. Unemployment stands at 9.5 percent, one-and-a-half percent higher than the White House predicted in January. The money that the White House assured us had to be spent in a "timely" manner to "get our economy moving again" has hardly been spent at all: According to the official Recovery.org website, as of July 24, only about a tenth of the stimulus--$70.2 billion, to be precise--had been "paid out." The 2009 deficit? It rose to $1 trillion in June. Gravity won't be enough to pull it back to earth.

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The stimulus has been such an expensive failure it is not surprising that voters are not willing to sign on for another Democrat boondoggle. They are also not going to sign on for the Democrats' anti energy program. What is interesting is that the Obama administration has been busy silencing the natural critics of the health care legislation while the voters abandoned them in droves. It must come as a surprise to them that voters came to this decision on their own.