Today’s top story. The spinmeisters who are against the Obama Administration, and have been since early 2009, are trying to put it out there, that no one should expect any big developments in Congress. The reason they give, in short, is because the Obama Administration exists.
I see this as nothing but yet one more excuse to sabotage our government, while more and more people realize that we are living under a constitutional crisis of the Republicans’, and especially, Southerners’, making. They’ve set the bar so low in 2013. Their next tactic is to insist that that is where the bar should be from henceforth. Little governing, except to get the social security checks and Medicare payments out for the old people. No passing of any laws, which, to me, is a radical disruption of what our government is supposed to do. The federal government is not one of these state institutions of the Deep South, where influential people and businesses in the shadows run everything. A tool of a banana republic. It is supposed to be a proactive institution that addresses the challenges of the day.
If the Democrats actually buy this line that “Obamacare” means that there is no impetus to do any changes to our policies on immigration, or the environment, or especially, on jobs, then they are still living in that 1970s funk where they are tone-deaf to the concerns of the vast middle class in America that developed out of the New Deal. That is the real problem of today. The New Deal is still very popular, and people who know about history (and many young people don’t) are wondering where the New Deal went. It was like having one or two generations of broad prosperity, and now, some kind of Ayn Randian Fantasy Nineteenth Century program.
I hope the Democrats take a progressive tack in 2014. When Obamacare goes right, you aren’t going to hear screams. It will be the one or two out of a hundred, for whom it goes wrong. When things go right, people don’t complain—and quite often, they don’t celebrate loudly, either. One doctor off the “in network” list, though, and it will be a front page article.
I hope the Democrats play it smart in the new year.
Hoofin 