ObamaCare: Hillary Clinton's Albatross
Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote these words in 1834: Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
Had I from old and young!
Instead of the cross, the Albatross
About my neck was hung.
He bequeathed to us the metaphor of an albatross hung around the neck of a man cursed by his own destructive act. It is a fitting metaphor for any Clinton 2016 campaign.
I do not know who her running mate will be. I know who it will not be: Kathleen Sebelius.
Unless she decides not to run, she is going to get the nomination. She has broad support within the party. She was a good loser in 2008. She served faithfully as Secretary of State right up to, and including, the debacle at Benghazi.
It doesn't matter who the Republicans nominate in 2016. She will be running against the reaction against ObamaCare. Defend ObamaCare will be her platform. She has no choice in the matter.
If ObamaCare becomes a major success, then she will be hard to beat. But if ObamaCare continues to perform as it has performed since October 1, it is going to be her albatross.
What can she possibly say against the Republican candidate, who will be running above all on this campaign slogan: Repeal ObamaCare? Never has there been a piece of legislation so ideally suited to defeating a candidate. The Republican Party voted across the board against ObamaCare in 2010. It had not one Republican supporter in Congress. ObamaCare is the ultimate partisan piece of legislation in American political history.
I can think of no other major piece of national legislation in American history where a minority political party voted unanimously against a piece of legislation, and then this legislation led to a program that was in its death throes on the day it was introduced. ObamaCare was dead on arrival.
Democratic Senators are already seeing that they are in the tar pits. Last week, all 15 of the Senate Democrats who are up for reelection in 2014 journeyed to the White House to express their concern.
It has happened once before. On August 7, 1974, two Senators, Barry Goldwater and Hugh Scott, and one Congressman made the trek to visit Richard Nixon. They told him that the House would impeach him, and only 15 Senators would vote against this. He resigned two days later.
ObamaCare has another three years to burn.
Every day, tens of thousands of Americans are getting form letters of cancellation from their health insurance companies. Every letter serves as an inducement to vote Republican in 2014 and 2016.
There is no way that this law can be repealed unless both houses of Congress go Republican in 2016, along with the presidency. Everybody knows this. Obama will never sign a bill to repeal ObamaCare. So, the Republican Party has its slogan: Repeal ObamaCare. That means "vote Republican." Everybody knows it. The Democrats know it. The Republicans know. The independents know it.
HILLARY'S DILEMMA
Hillary Clinton is trapped. She is going to run against ObamaCare, and she cannot do anything about it. She cannot say that the law was a bad law, because Democrats across the board in both houses of Congress voted for it. The president campaigned for it. Pelosi rammed it through the House. The entire Democratic establishment was in favor of this law, above all other laws passed under Obama. She cannot possibly criticize it as being economically catastrophic from the beginning. All she can do is criticize the programmers. But the programmers have done their work. They have squandered the $700 billion they were paid, and the launch was a disaster.
Of all the candidates that the Democrats can run, Hillary Clinton is least able to defend herself on the issue of socialized medicine. As first lady, she became the only first lady in history to manage an entire political program. Bill Clinton put her in charge of managing the legislation. The project blew up in his face. The Republicans ran against this in 1994, and they took back the House of Representatives. That was his last attempt to ram through a far-left program.
There is no way that she is going to escape this legacy. Her promotion of government-run medicine in 1993 was her only claim to political fame.
OPPOSITION GROWS DAILY
ObamaCare is now a hot issue. The Republicans are viscerally opposed to it. But with every policy cancellation letter that goes out, opposition to this disastrous law grows. There is nothing that the Democrats can do about this. The form letters will go out. Millions of them.
Republicans in the House of Representatives are now proposing a law that will grandfather these policies. In other words, if you bought a policy after the law was passed, and if you like the policy, the policy will not fall under the requirements of ObamaCare. They will become profitable once again. But this is the same as a partial repeal of ObamaCare.
Furthermore, the Republicans are proposing this for only one year. That will kick ObamaCare in the gut for 12 months, only to start up again in late 2014. The Republicans can go to the public in 2014 and claim that they saved the policies of all those people. They will then propose to do it again in 2015 and 2016. In other words, they're going to shut down a big portion of ObamaCare.
Policy by policy, the Republicans are ready to blow holes into the side of the good ship ObamaCare. They will cut it to pieces like scrap metal, and let the sucker go down.
The Democrats understand this, but what can they do about it? The Republicans are going to come before the voters in 2014 and claim that they were the ones who would have protected all of the poor victims of the cancellation letters. They will blame ObamaCare for the letters, and they will point out that they were the only ones who wanted to give the recipients of those cancellation letters an opportunity to keep their policies. They were the ones who stood in the gap, doing their best to fulfill Obama's promise: "If you like your insurance policy, you can keep it."
Democrats are trapped in a way that is unique over the last 50 years. They are trapped on board a burning ship. They can choose to remain on board, valiantly being burned alive, or else they can abandon ship.
In the poem about the albatross, everyone on board the ship was trapped. The curse came on all of them. The only way out for them was to abandon ship.
The Democrats' problem is that the ship is being circled by Republican sharks.
There is no way that the Democrats can get off this ship. Their only hope is that the programmers fix the website by November 30, and that the voters then sign up for the wonderful policies that Obama has assured us really do exist beyond the dead website. But if the policies are too expensive, even if the courts allow the subsidies (which they may not), the voters have already expressed disbelief. In a recent poll, only 22% of voters who have no health insurance said that they think the law will improve their families' position.
CONCLUSION
Hillary Clinton is no fool. She is watching the burning ship from a safe distance. She can get on board as captain in 2016, or she can decide that she has better things to do. If ObamaCare continues to burn out of control, she would be wise to go quietly into retirement without suffering a major defeat. She can decide not to step into the presidential ring against whoever runs against ObamaCare in 2016. At her age, she is entitled to a comfortable retirement. The price of retirement is simple. She must forgo the lust for power.
Ambrose Bierce, in his Devil's Dictionary, defined the presidency as the greased pig of American politics. Hillary Clinton can abandon her chase of the greased pig. Or she can choose to run as captain of whatever remains in 2016 of the burned-out ship.