Yesterday the White House circulated a memo by pollster Joel Benenson. It was designed to create momentum for Obamacare by convincing wayward House Democrats that support for the President’s plan has been building since the State of the Union. As with everything else that comes out of the White House on health care these days, the memo is nothing but pure fantasy.
This Tuesday, Gallup released its latest poll showing that by a 48%-45% margin Americans would tell their representative in Congress to vote against President Obama’s health plan. Compare that to the last time Gallup asked the question in January, Americans supported the President’s plan 49%-46%. That’s a net six point loss in support for the President’s plan since the State of the Union. That is momentum. Against Obamacare.
And Gallup isn’t alone. The Associated Press released a poll this week showing that 68% of Americans believe the President and Congressional Democrats shouldn’t pass their health care plan without Republican support. “Nothing has been more disconcerting than to watch Democratic politicians and their media supporters deceive themselves into believing that the public favors the Democrats’ current health-care plan,” Democratic pollsters Pat Caddell and Doug Schoen add in today’s Washington Post, “A solid majority of Americans opposes the massive health-reform plan.”
Yesterday was particularly tough for the President’s plan. First, the White House underwhelmed the Democratic Caucus in a presentation of the new (still unwritten) reconciliation bill. Then, the Senate Parliamentarian killed the Democrats favored procedural path for passage by signaling he would rule that President Obama must sign the original Senate bill into law before the Senate could act on the President’s new reconciliation package. Finally, the Associated Press reported that House leaders have abandoned all hope of finding language to satisfy Rep. Bart Stupak’s (D-MI) concerns that the Senate bill funds abortion. By the end of the day, the leftist firedoglake site had dropped its count of committed House Democrats for passage to 189 (Speaker Pelosi needs 216 for passage).
With the loss of Stupak and his 7-12 member caucus opposed to taxpayer-funded-abortions, Speaker Pelosi will have to find the remaining dozen plus votes from the ranks of cost conscious Blue Dog Democrats. For example, Rep. Suzanne Kosmas (D-FL) who voted against the House bill in the fall explained at the time: “According to the Congressional Budget Office, the House health care bill will actually increase federal health care spending over the long term, while proposals being considered by the Senate would have a net decrease.” But according to a new CBO score of the Senate bill passed on Christmas Eve (the one with the Cornhusker Kickback), it actually increases health care spending. And the reconciliation bill only make things worse, since, among other increased spending measures, President Obama “fixed” the Cornhusker Kickback not by eliminating the new spending, but by extending it to all 50 states.
With no votes piling up, and “yes” votes materializing, the Democratic plans to shove Obamacare down the throats of the American people are becoming more and more desperate. This Monday, the House Budget Committee will begin markup on the new reconciliation bill even though actual legislative text does not exist for it yet. The Democrats plan to pass a shell of a bill through the appropriate committees so that the Rules Committee can then substitute the bill that is being drafted completely behind closed doors by the White House and Senate and Democrat leaders.
Politico reports that despite the Parliamentarian’s initial verbal ruling, they will press on with their Slaughter Rule plan to pass the Senate bill without voting on it. NRO’s Yuval Levin quips: “Democratic leaders should be asking themselves just how they have gotten to the point that their strategy is to amend a law that doesn’t exist yet by passing a bill without voting on it.”
But President Obama’s progressive base is way past rational thought when it comes to health care. They want it passed at any cost. And as George Will pointed out yesterday, the very essence of progressivism sublimates the democratic process to the rule of experts in Washington. No one can say if this bill will finally pass, but if it does, it is abundantly clear that our republican form of government will be permanently damaged by it.
Quick Hits:
- House Republicans agreed Thursday to adopt a ban on congressional earmarks in spending bills for next year.
- The Justice Department acknowledged yesterday that Attorney General Eric Holder failed to disclose to the Senate that he had signed several briefs arguing the President has no power to detain American citizens as enemy combatants.
- Countrywide Financial special loan recipient Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT) will unveil his financial reform bill on Monday without any bipartisan support.
- The Obama administration has fallen far behind in making anti-corruption checks on new hires and current employees on the Mexican border.
- President Barack Obama promised yesterday to revive legislation that would grant amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants currently in the United States.
A top priority of the Obama presidency has been to restore the image of the United States in the world; in image allegedly left in tatters by the Bush administration. Unfortunately for the president, however, Americans by a wide margin now believe that that the United States standing in the world has not improved, but actually declined since President Obama took office.
According to a poll conducted in late February and released this week by Democracy Corps-Third Way, Americans by a 10-point margin think that the standing of the United States has dropped under Obama — by a whopping 51 percent to 41 percent. On the question of national security, Democrats now trail Republicans by 17 percent, and on the “right-track, wrong track,” question just 31 feel the country is headed in the right directions, with a massive 62 percent registering discontent.
Reported in The Washington Times, though not much in evidence in other “mainstream media,” the poll is far from the product of a hopeful conservative imagination. Democracy Corps-Third Way is a Democratic polling group headed by former Clinton adviser James Carville and Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg. Their purpose is to warn Democrats of the electoral turbulence ahead. “We would not want the election to be held today, with this poll, Greenberg told the newspaper. “If the election were held today, this would be a ‘change election.’”
The authors of the survey expressed surprise over the decline among Americans of their view of America’s international clout, given such international recognition as the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to President Obama. But it should not come as a surprise.
Though resembling Jimmy Carter to some degree in this regard, Barack Obama has set an all-time record for almost instinctively disparaging the United States on foreign soil. In a list of Obama’s apologies, the Heritage Foundation’s Nile Gardiner and Morgan Roach include: “America has shown arrogance,” France, April 2009; “We have not been perfect,” interview with Al Arabiya January 2009; “At times we sought to dictate our own terms,” Trinidad and Tobago, April 2009; “We went off course,” Washington DC, May, 2009, “Our own darker periods in our history,” Washington D.C., May, 2009, and on and on. This approach may be popular with foreign audiences, but it is not so with Americans, whose sons and daughters today are fighting on foreign soil to advance freedom and stability for other nations.
In addition, the White House lack of protocol when it comes to handling foreign leaders has been characterized by a lack of understanding of the basics of diplomacy, which makes the U.S. government seem hopelessly clumsy at best, and arrogant and insensitive at worst. This list includes, of course, the president’s gifts of an iPod with his own speeches to the Queen of England and a set of non-workable videos to British Prime Minister Gordon Brown – and of course Hillary Clinton’s famously mistranslated “reset” button given to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. In addition the president has insulted the king of Norway, the president of France and the prime minister of the Czech Republic by declining invitations to break bread with them during official visits.
Americans overall are very patriotic, and especially at a time of war, they do not appreciate their country being humiliated on the world stage and talked down over and over again – by no less than their own president.
UPDATE: An earlier version of this post misidentified one Presidential gift. It is now correct.