...you so far haven’t laid out what the GOP proposed in 2009 and offered votes to support...
Assume it was actually "nothing", as you're claiming. Why is this a bad thing? Would the country have blown up without Obamacare? The bulk of the country was happy with their insurance, and only unhappy with the cost, and they wanted what Obama promised which was to lower costs.
Obamacare was designed to expand coverage, i.e. pulling people into the system... and getting the rest of us to pay for it. That's a worthy goal, but not what was advertised and "worthy" is not the same as "popular".
Opposing this, while proposing (by implication) that we don't change the existing system, is perfectly legit.
Obama took ownership of the health care system, this was a high-risk, high-reward move. If he'd actually done a good job and fulfilled his promises, then Dems would be getting elected bragging about the great job they did.
Instead prices have continued to go up (not down), and we got a website that showed a stunning lack of competence, and the coverage isn't that great.
Bush got punished for mishandling the war(s).
Obama has gotten punished for mishandling healthcare.
Yes, the GOP made it harder for him. But he's an adult and the Dems chosen leader. He's supposed to be up to the job of being President, and a big part of that is handling the opposition.
Prove things out at a state level, figure out what works and what doesn't, then after that argue the Feds should be copying it. Sounds really good, and it's how the system is supposed to work.
A 25 year old is automatically disqualified, someone with business interests is only disqualified if he doesn't get Congressional permission. IMHO getting Congressional permission won't be that hard. Whether or not it's a good idea is a different matter.
...I don’t think that trusting the best available data and allocating resources based on it was really an avoidable mistake...
I strongly question whether she's using "the best available data" when we see results like this. It seems more likely she paid for yes-men who told her what she wanted to hear, and she fired anyone who didn't. The stories we're hearing are of that and too much central planning.
She (twice!) had three amazing resources, time, money, and the backing of the establishment... and she still blew it twice. I have to think we're looking at serious management issues.
Are you saying she would have done more of the same thing that got her the popular vote, thus screwing up? This is where things get unclear. “Didn’t work” sort of implies that the burden would be on her to fix something that wasn’t working, but it seems like in terms of getting more people to vote for her, it did work just fine.
She won what wasn't important by focusing on what wasn't important. She spent time, money, and other resources ineffectually. She had no clue she was in trouble because her bubble was so thick even her husband's advice was ignored.
Further, this is the 2nd time in 8 years she's lost to an underfunded opponent because she had organizational, informational, and mismanagement problems.
I don't see why any of these issues go away if the rules are different, especially because when the rules were different she still managed to turn lots of money into defeat. Change the rules a third time and I fully expect we'd see her manage the same trick again.
Most folks – the majority of folks – like guarantee issue, community rating, no rescission, Rule 26, caps on insurance co. profits, etc, etc.
Free benefits are always popular. Whether they're popular enough to pay for is something else.
Healthcare reform has often been a story of the Dems (or the public) wanting Universal Coverage (or in this case, to expand coverage) but flinching away from how much it'd cost.
Calling it "simplistic rejection" ignores that dynamic.
In the case of the GOP’s blanket opposition it was rather easy to organize since the party’s naked immediate interests and political welfare were both aligned so it didn’t take a lot of work.
True, but this deserves a lot more detail. If Obamacare was in the country's best interest, why was opposing it popular?
Obama was amazing popular and respected while the GOP weren't. The obvious move for Obama was for him to explain to the American people how this Bill was in their interest and have them put pressure on the GOP until they caved. Reagan was a master of this, others could make it work.
So Obama explained... that you could keep your doctor (the lie of the year), and costs would go down, etc. Lots of people recognized that these were lies and decided that Obamacare wasn't in their best interests. That the Bill was thousands of pages long (and thus unreadable) didn't help, nor did the fact that most Congressmen didn't understand what was in it (meaning the public couldn't).
The ACA was basically the GOP’s final offer from the previous time health care reform had been debated.
And yet no Dem, no matter how far to the left, voted against it because it was too far to the right. And with a super majority it'd be very odd behavior to write a right-leaning bill. The way it was presented at the time was the left negotiated with the far left in terms of what they'd do.
Obama offered the entire farm on the sequester negotiations and the only reason the GOP didn’t get it is they were so gone into rejectionism that they couldn’t countenance trading tax increases for spending cuts on a ten to one basis in their favor.
Was this when they were using 10 year accounting with the offered spending cuts happening in years 9 and 10 (i.e. after Obama left office)?
...then there’s no way they’re going to be able to pass that buck onto the liberals.
I think that's a reasonable statement, but given how many times the GOP has been wrong about who the voters will blame, I don't think a serious miscalculation on their part is unlikely.
Rather than think the GOP is stunningly competent in spite of all the evidence, I'd rather believe that they're every bit as disorganized, short sighted, and selfish as their actions suggest. They're JV High School, not Pro. Most of them would sell out their "principles" for a loose dollar. All of them are for whatever will get them elected.
Which means keeping them unified and opposed needed huge amounts of "help" from Obama himself. When the Grandmaster Chess player loses, repeatedly, to some High School Schmuck it's worth checking out his record, and if that record doesn't actually have a noted history of success, then why am I supposed to think he's a Grandmaster?
I think it's more like "how do we *make* these people do this".
Even assuming Trump EC delegates were picked for loyalty to the GOP and not loyalty to Trump (which btw I don't think is correct), Trump has been on a massive "sanity" show recently.
...the idea that the GOP’s hissy fit during the end stages of the ACA constituted the ACA being deeply unpopular doesn’t pass the laugh test.
The GOP's "base" wasn't the group that took Ted Kennedy's seat from the Dems and handed it to the GOP, for the express and specific purpose of blocking Obamacare. Similarly Obamacare got every Blue dog dem thrown out of office.
He passed the ACA and ran again- he won again.
Which was fine for him, less fine for everyone else who needed to run on voting for it. Lesson to be learned here is big changes/programs are big political risks if they only have narrow majorities.
Obamacare was passed with the political gamble that it'd be popular no matter how unpopular it was. Obamacare's various promises turned out to be happy marketing talk which raised expectations higher than could be met. Healthcare costs went up, not down as promised. You couldn't keep your doctor as promised, etc.
The GOP have majorities in Congress and the Presidency. If they look back at the past eight years and think that blame will fall to the minority party without the Presidency if they repeal the ACA with nothing to replace it that’d be an… extraordinary leap to say the least.
This is the same group which repeatedly shut down the gov thinking "this time" they wouldn't be blamed.
BTW this kind of shown incompetence is one of the reasons I doubt they were super-competent when dealing with Obama in "denying" him various victories and "preventing him" from having bipartisan wins. IMHO it's a lot more likely he's just not good at this sort of thing (probably deal making here, although coalition building and reaching out to the other side also are part of it).
A really thin resume should be read for what's not on it as well as what is. Keeping politicians unified and preventing them from doing what's in their own selfish interest is like herding cats.... and the Minority head of the House/Senate have a lot less power than a Popular President with sky high approval ratings.
Well written, and very believable... but I heard really similar statements on why Trump couldn't win the Primary, and again on why he couldn't win the election (heck, I made them myself and believed them at the time).
Now I think Trump is a lot better at this than we thought, that the media under counts him significantly, and with different rules he would have played his cards differently. He'd have told different lies, picked different outrageous fights, shown himself to be a total ass**** in different ways...
...and in this alternate universe, we'd be talking about how under EC rules he wouldn't have won.
At that point, the definition of “the left” reduces to “anyone the right disagrees with”. And then we’re back to playing a game which literally could, as I said, go on all day.
Race riots enflamed by BLM's lies (Mike Brown didn't have his hands up).
Union violence (the worst incident in living memory would be burning down a hotel's worth of people because they crossed picket lines, but less extreme happens whenever someone seriously tries right to work).
And right now members of the Electoral College are getting death threats because the left doesn't like Trump and is looking for ways to get the EC to move against him.
This isn't "anyone the right disagrees with", this is "pretty mainstream left".
Dark Matter: Are you claiming Obamacare was popular when he passed it and that the Dems didn’t pay a political cost for supporting it?
North: Certainly not. Are you claiming that Obama and his Party didn’t campaign on reforming healthcare in 2008?
Your 2nd statement doesn't pass the "so what?" question.
The Dems knew Obamacare was deeply unpopular and passed it anyway. We live in a democracy, the people's response was to punish the Dems and reward the GOP.
At that point they can either try to repeal the ACA without anything to replace it and see how much the electorate likes that...
We'll see. They could just repeal it and then "negotiate" with the Dems on what to replace it and gamble that the voters blame the Dems for any problems.
or they can do what the GOP should have done in 2009 and add their own policies to the mix in exchange for their votes and then support it.
The reported price for adding their own policies to the mix was supporting single payer.
With the Trump win what exactly does the GOP have now?
Depends on what Trump does, rather than what he says. If he tries to implement White Power (which I assume he won't), then he'll go down in flames and the GOP will suffer.
Someone on this board described the GOP as a selection of people who care about Guns! Moats! God! & Money!
He ran on the first three, but it's easy to picture him as a Money! guy.
If Trump takes the Presidency seriously and devotes himself to Money! (i.e. economic growth) and good governance, then that's enough to build a party on even if Trump himself has serious personality problems.
Troublesome Frog: Why would that phenomenon be unique enough to Republicans that it would bias the results?
Every state votes for President, but a third of the Senate isn't up for election at all that cycle. The House often is Germandered enough so that it's only the Primary that's interesting.
None of this is "unique" to the GOP, but California is enough to move the needle and California (from the GOP's standpoint) was the odd duck out this cycle because there was nothing of interest for a GOP voter. The GOP vote there was sharply down from previous elections (and even in a typical election a GOP vote there wouldn't count much).
So in a different year California's GOP would have had an extra million or two voters (not 3), and with different rules we need to infer what would happen from what did happen this election in the battleground states.
Trump's people turned out in really high numbers where it mattered (HRC's did not), so make California and other states matter and I don't see why we'd think she has a cakewalk.
For Chicago? Probably... although the PV was only 1% away from a tie in 2000, and Chicago probably did (corruptly) swing the election in 1960. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_1960#Controversies
However California is in a position to wait and see how much they'd need to move the needle to move the election, and that's a pretty tempting power to abuse. I don't want to be in the business of trying to make every part of the US non-corrupt for the Presidential election when we have Bush v Gore showing even the Supremes can be moved.
Imagine a recount, not limited to just Florida or some backwards place, but covering all of America. Now picture Chicago magically "finding" just enough votes to swing the election.
I like the EC, but I don't see why we need people in it. Force them to vote the way they're supposed to vote and call it a day.
greginak: That trump could have won the PV is an assertion without any evidence.
He won where he wanted to win, where it was important for him to win, even in places like Michigan and various other members of the Blue Wall.
You tell me the rules, I'll tell you my actions. Telling me you could have won with different rules? That also has no evidence because everyone would have changed their actions.
This would make more sense if Trump won the popular vote. He did not. He lost it by three million people.
Meaning the GOP in California didn't turn out because both "past the post" candidates for their election were Dems and they knew there'd be no point in voting for the Presidency.
If the rules were set up to care about the popular vote, there's a good chance Trump would have still won.
Agree with all of this... but I'm not sure it matters.
The Left is going to stay in denial for a while. Worse, they're seriously not ready for Trump being much better than Obama at the nuts and bolts of the Presidency, and that's looking more and more likely.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “The Electoral College Option”
Assume it was actually "nothing", as you're claiming. Why is this a bad thing? Would the country have blown up without Obamacare? The bulk of the country was happy with their insurance, and only unhappy with the cost, and they wanted what Obama promised which was to lower costs.
Obamacare was designed to expand coverage, i.e. pulling people into the system... and getting the rest of us to pay for it. That's a worthy goal, but not what was advertised and "worthy" is not the same as "popular".
Opposing this, while proposing (by implication) that we don't change the existing system, is perfectly legit.
Obama took ownership of the health care system, this was a high-risk, high-reward move. If he'd actually done a good job and fulfilled his promises, then Dems would be getting elected bragging about the great job they did.
Instead prices have continued to go up (not down), and we got a website that showed a stunning lack of competence, and the coverage isn't that great.
Bush got punished for mishandling the war(s).
Obama has gotten punished for mishandling healthcare.
Yes, the GOP made it harder for him. But he's an adult and the Dems chosen leader. He's supposed to be up to the job of being President, and a big part of that is handling the opposition.
"
Prove things out at a state level, figure out what works and what doesn't, then after that argue the Feds should be copying it. Sounds really good, and it's how the system is supposed to work.
"
A 25 year old is automatically disqualified, someone with business interests is only disqualified if he doesn't get Congressional permission. IMHO getting Congressional permission won't be that hard. Whether or not it's a good idea is a different matter.
"
Eh? Other than being a Conservative and his personality, what's he done that is so awful?
"
I strongly question whether she's using "the best available data" when we see results like this. It seems more likely she paid for yes-men who told her what she wanted to hear, and she fired anyone who didn't. The stories we're hearing are of that and too much central planning.
She (twice!) had three amazing resources, time, money, and the backing of the establishment... and she still blew it twice. I have to think we're looking at serious management issues.
"
She won what wasn't important by focusing on what wasn't important. She spent time, money, and other resources ineffectually. She had no clue she was in trouble because her bubble was so thick even her husband's advice was ignored.
Further, this is the 2nd time in 8 years she's lost to an underfunded opponent because she had organizational, informational, and mismanagement problems.
I don't see why any of these issues go away if the rules are different, especially because when the rules were different she still managed to turn lots of money into defeat. Change the rules a third time and I fully expect we'd see her manage the same trick again.
"
I think she would have doubled down on the things which didn't work for her, including ignoring her husband's advice.
"
Free benefits are always popular. Whether they're popular enough to pay for is something else.
Healthcare reform has often been a story of the Dems (or the public) wanting Universal Coverage (or in this case, to expand coverage) but flinching away from how much it'd cost.
Calling it "simplistic rejection" ignores that dynamic.
"
Then why did Obama have to go out and give the lie of the year (among others) to get it to pass?
"
True, but this deserves a lot more detail. If Obamacare was in the country's best interest, why was opposing it popular?
Obama was amazing popular and respected while the GOP weren't. The obvious move for Obama was for him to explain to the American people how this Bill was in their interest and have them put pressure on the GOP until they caved. Reagan was a master of this, others could make it work.
So Obama explained... that you could keep your doctor (the lie of the year), and costs would go down, etc. Lots of people recognized that these were lies and decided that Obamacare wasn't in their best interests. That the Bill was thousands of pages long (and thus unreadable) didn't help, nor did the fact that most Congressmen didn't understand what was in it (meaning the public couldn't).
And yet no Dem, no matter how far to the left, voted against it because it was too far to the right. And with a super majority it'd be very odd behavior to write a right-leaning bill. The way it was presented at the time was the left negotiated with the far left in terms of what they'd do.
Was this when they were using 10 year accounting with the offered spending cuts happening in years 9 and 10 (i.e. after Obama left office)?
I think that's a reasonable statement, but given how many times the GOP has been wrong about who the voters will blame, I don't think a serious miscalculation on their part is unlikely.
Rather than think the GOP is stunningly competent in spite of all the evidence, I'd rather believe that they're every bit as disorganized, short sighted, and selfish as their actions suggest. They're JV High School, not Pro. Most of them would sell out their "principles" for a loose dollar. All of them are for whatever will get them elected.
Which means keeping them unified and opposed needed huge amounts of "help" from Obama himself. When the Grandmaster Chess player loses, repeatedly, to some High School Schmuck it's worth checking out his record, and if that record doesn't actually have a noted history of success, then why am I supposed to think he's a Grandmaster?
"
I think it's more like "how do we *make* these people do this".
Even assuming Trump EC delegates were picked for loyalty to the GOP and not loyalty to Trump (which btw I don't think is correct), Trump has been on a massive "sanity" show recently.
"
The GOP's "base" wasn't the group that took Ted Kennedy's seat from the Dems and handed it to the GOP, for the express and specific purpose of blocking Obamacare. Similarly Obamacare got every Blue dog dem thrown out of office.
Which was fine for him, less fine for everyone else who needed to run on voting for it. Lesson to be learned here is big changes/programs are big political risks if they only have narrow majorities.
Obamacare was passed with the political gamble that it'd be popular no matter how unpopular it was. Obamacare's various promises turned out to be happy marketing talk which raised expectations higher than could be met. Healthcare costs went up, not down as promised. You couldn't keep your doctor as promised, etc.
This is the same group which repeatedly shut down the gov thinking "this time" they wouldn't be blamed.
BTW this kind of shown incompetence is one of the reasons I doubt they were super-competent when dealing with Obama in "denying" him various victories and "preventing him" from having bipartisan wins. IMHO it's a lot more likely he's just not good at this sort of thing (probably deal making here, although coalition building and reaching out to the other side also are part of it).
A really thin resume should be read for what's not on it as well as what is. Keeping politicians unified and preventing them from doing what's in their own selfish interest is like herding cats.... and the Minority head of the House/Senate have a lot less power than a Popular President with sky high approval ratings.
"
Well written, and very believable... but I heard really similar statements on why Trump couldn't win the Primary, and again on why he couldn't win the election (heck, I made them myself and believed them at the time).
Now I think Trump is a lot better at this than we thought, that the media under counts him significantly, and with different rules he would have played his cards differently. He'd have told different lies, picked different outrageous fights, shown himself to be a total ass**** in different ways...
...and in this alternate universe, we'd be talking about how under EC rules he wouldn't have won.
"
Race riots enflamed by BLM's lies (Mike Brown didn't have his hands up).
Union violence (the worst incident in living memory would be burning down a hotel's worth of people because they crossed picket lines, but less extreme happens whenever someone seriously tries right to work).
And right now members of the Electoral College are getting death threats because the left doesn't like Trump and is looking for ways to get the EC to move against him.
This isn't "anyone the right disagrees with", this is "pretty mainstream left".
"
Your 2nd statement doesn't pass the "so what?" question.
The Dems knew Obamacare was deeply unpopular and passed it anyway. We live in a democracy, the people's response was to punish the Dems and reward the GOP.
We'll see. They could just repeal it and then "negotiate" with the Dems on what to replace it and gamble that the voters blame the Dems for any problems.
The reported price for adding their own policies to the mix was supporting single payer.
"
If you need to point to events which happened 50+ years ago, it's an indication of the weakness of your argument, not its strength.
If my city (or even "a city") burns, the way to bet is it will be because some group of the left doesn't like something.
"
Are you claiming Obamacare was popular when he passed it and that the Dems didn't pay a political cost for supporting it?
"
From his picks, he seems to be taking his "gov is a problem, lower its burden" talk seriously. There's certainly a lot of low hanging fruit.
I'm starting to get hopeful.
"
Depends on what Trump does, rather than what he says. If he tries to implement White Power (which I assume he won't), then he'll go down in flames and the GOP will suffer.
Someone on this board described the GOP as a selection of people who care about Guns! Moats! God! & Money!
He ran on the first three, but it's easy to picture him as a Money! guy.
If Trump takes the Presidency seriously and devotes himself to Money! (i.e. economic growth) and good governance, then that's enough to build a party on even if Trump himself has serious personality problems.
"
Every state votes for President, but a third of the Senate isn't up for election at all that cycle. The House often is Germandered enough so that it's only the Primary that's interesting.
None of this is "unique" to the GOP, but California is enough to move the needle and California (from the GOP's standpoint) was the odd duck out this cycle because there was nothing of interest for a GOP voter. The GOP vote there was sharply down from previous elections (and even in a typical election a GOP vote there wouldn't count much).
So in a different year California's GOP would have had an extra million or two voters (not 3), and with different rules we need to infer what would happen from what did happen this election in the battleground states.
Trump's people turned out in really high numbers where it mattered (HRC's did not), so make California and other states matter and I don't see why we'd think she has a cakewalk.
"
For Chicago? Probably... although the PV was only 1% away from a tie in 2000, and Chicago probably did (corruptly) swing the election in 1960. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_1960#Controversies
However California is in a position to wait and see how much they'd need to move the needle to move the election, and that's a pretty tempting power to abuse. I don't want to be in the business of trying to make every part of the US non-corrupt for the Presidential election when we have Bush v Gore showing even the Supremes can be moved.
"
The potential downside of that is pretty extreme.
Imagine a recount, not limited to just Florida or some backwards place, but covering all of America. Now picture Chicago magically "finding" just enough votes to swing the election.
I like the EC, but I don't see why we need people in it. Force them to vote the way they're supposed to vote and call it a day.
"
He won where he wanted to win, where it was important for him to win, even in places like Michigan and various other members of the Blue Wall.
You tell me the rules, I'll tell you my actions. Telling me you could have won with different rules? That also has no evidence because everyone would have changed their actions.
"
Meaning the GOP in California didn't turn out because both "past the post" candidates for their election were Dems and they knew there'd be no point in voting for the Presidency.
If the rules were set up to care about the popular vote, there's a good chance Trump would have still won.
"
Agree with all of this... but I'm not sure it matters.
The Left is going to stay in denial for a while. Worse, they're seriously not ready for Trump being much better than Obama at the nuts and bolts of the Presidency, and that's looking more and more likely.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.