GUEST ANALYSIS-"If everything -- everything -- isn’t fixed by Nov. 30, we’re looking at a presidency that is going to collapse into utter disaster."
That's how Michael Tomasky sums up, quite accurately, the current media narrative on the troubled launch of Obamacare. Why is the "end times for Obama" meme turning up everywhere? Tomasky attributes it to a journalistic worldview that is always about who is displaying mastery of the game and who is being mastered at any given moment ... a certain type of political journalism that so exists in the moment that numerous such moments have been declared to be disasters for Obama, going back to Jeremiah Wright.
No doubt that's part of the story. So is another piece of the journalism game, explained by David Gergen: The administration was " really riding high" during the government shutdown "because the Republicans were on the defensive" and ended up in utter defeat, as far as the mass media were concerned. Now the media need a president on the defensive, just to make the political game tense enough in the moment to keep their ratings up.
If Obamacare is ultimately judged a failure it will be yet another victory for the myth of rugged individualism. Still, no story has such powerful "legs" (as they say in the newsroom) unless a big segment of the public is already inclined to care about it. So we should dig deeper and ask why so many people are ready to believe that Obama and his administration are facing disaster when, logically speaking, nothing terrible has happened at all.
Yes, the website is a mess. But we are all accustomed to being frustrated by malfunctioning websites; it's just a normal part of life now. We are also accustomed to glitches in the rollout of government programs. Medicare Part D had major problems. The glaring "donut hole" didn't get repaired for years. Yet no one saw that program as the demise of the G.W. Bush administration. "In the end," as Paul Krugman wrote, "the program delivered lasting benefits, and woe unto any politician proposing that it be rolled back."
Most importantly, people who want or need to sign up for insurance under Obamacare still have a full four and a half months to do it. The current glitches, which apparently are huge, don't constitute an emergency by any stretch of the imagination.
Yes, the president lied when he said no one would have to give up the insurance they already have. But we are all accustomed to presidents lying for political advantage. The question we ought to ask is: What are the consequences of the gap between the lie and the truth?
If the consequences are, say, a disastrous eight years of war in Iraq, then that's something to be very upset about. If the consequences are that people will have to have better health insurance, for which a few will pay significantly more, we are in a very different ballpark.
Matthew Yglesias, among many others, makes a compelling case that "It’s Good That You Can’t Keep Your Insurance Plan." Insurers are only canceling plans that threatened their profits, he argues, plans they would have canceled anyway once the insured got seriously ill.
So when Krugman wrote "the glitches of October won’t matter in the long run," he was giving the public credit for thinking the issue through reasonably. But by the end of that month he was starting to worry about the public's reasonableness:
"The biggest reason Obama and co. should be anxious to fix these things now, I’d argue, isn’t the fate of the program itself, which can survive even large early wobbles, but the midterm elections. If Obamacare is fixed, Republicans will be in the position of attacking a program that is benefiting millions of Americans; if it isn’t, they can still run against the legend, not the fact."
With a tweak of terminology, I'd say that Republicans will run -- indeed already are running, and have been for a long time -- against the mythic narrative that gave rise to Obamacare in the first place.
Obama's narrative about health care reform was consistent from the beginning. By saying that most Americans would experience no change he tried to steer the public conversation away from the question of how his reform would impact individuals. What he talked about, over and over again, was how it would improve the quality and outcomes of the nation's health care system as a whole, while reducing the cost for the nation as a whole.
Whether he was right or wrong about that isn't relevant to my point here. I'm simply saying that the president and the people who created Obamacare were telling a story about what would happen to the whole country, to all of us Americans en masse. That's apparently the way they looked at the issue. In any event, that's certainly the way they talked about it.
The Republican-led opposition to Obamacare was based on just the opposite narrative: Think about (and be frightened by) what will happen to you, as an individual, and to your own private family. The GOP never tried very hard to rebut the administration's claims about what would happen to the nation as a socioeconomic system. That simply wasn't relevant to their story.
The sense of catastrophe that pervades mass media reports about Obamacare now is based squarely on that Republican narrative. So many individuals are unhappy! That's all it amounts to. If the president were fully honest (which, let's face it, no president ever is), he'd say:
Well, we knew some individuals would be unhappy. We didn't expect so many to be unhappy. But it's really beside the point. Every systemic change makes some individuals unhappy. My job isn't to make every individual happy -- which would be impossible anyway. My job, indeed the job of any federal official, is to improve the quality of life for the nation as a whole.
Obama cannot say that and hope to survive politically because he never succeeded in winning the public at large over to his narrative. The rules of the political game are still defined by the conservative narrative, which asks only one question: "What's in it for me? Right now?"
That narrative goes back at least to the 1820s, when Andrew Jackson waged, and eventually won, a fierce political battle against John Quincy Adams and his close political ally, Henry Clay. The problems Adams and Clay faced then are strikingly similar to the ones Obama confronts now. They were widely perceived, with good reason, as pro-big-business leaders. They were eager to unleash the budding capitalist energies of the corporate and financial sectors in their day.
For Adams and Clay, though, that eagerness was merely part of a larger program of improving the nation, a program that Clay dubbed "The American System." An equally important part was an ambitious series of improvements in transportation and infrastructure funded by the federal government.
Daniel Walker Howe, in his Pulitzer-Prize winning history of the era, says that "as Clay envisioned it, the American System ... would create, not division between the haves and have-nots, but a framework within which all could work harmoniously to improve themselves both individually and collectively." And the collective improvement would be the precondition of individual improvement.
Adams and Clay, like Obama and his administration, focused most on what they thought was best for the nation as a whole, assuming that a more robust national economy would benefit everyone.
Perhaps Clay was fooling himself, thinking that his System would not widen the gap between haves and have-nots, since it was so tilted toward the interests of the emerging financial and corporate sectors. Obama shows the same tilt, of course.
But it's hard to see how his health care reform would increase economic inequality, compared to the health care inequity and chaos we have now. Obamacare is built on the same mythic narrative of national improvement touted by Clay and Adams -- a narrative that has become the heart and soul of what we now call liberalism.
Back in the 1820s, as now, resistance to that narrative was not based on opposition to the particulars of any policy. "Jackson possessed an appeal not based on issues," says Howe; "It derived from his image as a victor in battle, a frontiersman who had made it big, a man of decision who forged his own rules." In short, Jackson was the ultimate prototype of American "rugged individualism" -- a narrative that has become the heart and soul of what we now call conservatism.
Howe cites another historian, Daniel Feller, to explain why Adams and Clay could never sell America on their American System. "The inclination of its people was for diffusion rather than discipline, toward self-determination and away from supervision, however benign." Everyone going their own way and doing their own thing, judging the value of any policy by the immediate fulfillment it gives individuals, has often been a winning narrative in American political life, at least since the 1820s.
Apparently it still is today. That's why it's so easy for the media to sell the story of "end times for Obama."
Jackson also won lots of votes, says Howe, by initiating another "common and effective tactic in American politics: running against Washington, D.C." Rugged individualists versus the federal government: The more things have changed since the 1820s, it seems, the more they've stayed the same.
The panic engendered by the few brief weeks of the stumbling launch of health care reform comes from the Jacksonian narrative dominating the nation: judging government by what it has done for me and my family very lately, in the current moment.
So there's much more hanging on the fate of Obamacare than health care or the 2014 election, as important as those are. Obamacare is an effort to reassert the mythic narrative that Adams, Clay, and so many other American leaders have promoted -- a story of Americans concerned more about what happens to all of us as a nation than to any one of us as individuals. If Obamacare is ultimately judged a failure it will be yet another victory for the myth of rugged individualism.
(Ira Chernus is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder and author of Mythic America: Essays and American Nonviolence: The History of an Idea. He blogs at MythicAmerica.us. This piece was posted first at CommonDreams.com)
-cw
CityWatch
Vol 11 Issue 93
Pub: Nov 19, 2013
