Noonan: The trauma of the past few weeks will likely, and ironically, leave Americans more open to a simple single-payer approach. People are wondering if we are seeing the end of liberalism. We are not. Liberalism, a great and storied American political tradition, will survive this. But progressivism—liberalism without blood—has been badly, deeply damaged.
Peggy Noonan writes in The Wall Street Journal:
Weeks ago they were talking of the possibility of a death spiral, but ObamaCare is in a death spiral.
[T]he trauma of the past few weeks will likely, and ironically, leave Americans more open to a simple single-payer approach—but they should give up on ObamaCare.
[Democrats] can hunker down and lose in 2014. They can take the advice of Democratic National Committee chairman Debbie Wasserman Schultz: Run on ObamaCare, go home and explain how great it is. Which is another way of saying stand by the limp and tattered flag, draw all the fire and die on the field.
More and more it seems obvious that the vast majority of the politicians who pushed the bill in the House and Senate never read it. They didn't know what was in it. They had no idea. They don't understand insurance—they're in politics, a branch of showbiz.
Some of them would have tried to read it, but it was 2,000 pages of impenetrable paragraphs—real word-clots, word-slabs—accompanied by long lines of swimming numbers. Comprehensive bills are never comprehensible ones—they are meant to lack clarity. Administrations get bills passed and then let administration regulators interpret them. That's why Nancy Pelosi said: "We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it." It was literally true!
Weeks ago they were talking of the possibility of a death spiral, but ObamaCare is in a death spiral.
[T]he trauma of the past few weeks will likely, and ironically, leave Americans more open to a simple single-payer approach—but they should give up on ObamaCare.
[Democrats] can hunker down and lose in 2014. They can take the advice of Democratic National Committee chairman Debbie Wasserman Schultz: Run on ObamaCare, go home and explain how great it is. Which is another way of saying stand by the limp and tattered flag, draw all the fire and die on the field.
More and more it seems obvious that the vast majority of the politicians who pushed the bill in the House and Senate never read it. They didn't know what was in it. They had no idea. They don't understand insurance—they're in politics, a branch of showbiz.
Some of them would have tried to read it, but it was 2,000 pages of impenetrable paragraphs—real word-clots, word-slabs—accompanied by long lines of swimming numbers. Comprehensive bills are never comprehensible ones—they are meant to lack clarity. Administrations get bills passed and then let administration regulators interpret them. That's why Nancy Pelosi said: "We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it." It was literally true!
One thing about the progressives of Congress: They really drank the Kool-Aid. They really did think government could do anything. They were sincere! They really thought there were no limits.
I wonder if this will sober them up.
People are wondering if we are seeing the end of liberalism. We are not. Liberalism, a great and storied American political tradition, will survive this. But progressivism—liberalism without blood—has been badly, deeply damaged. We are seeing the end of its first major emanation, ObamaCare.
posted by Sid Cottingham | 2:44 PM
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