100 Years of Right (And Left) Moves: the progressive truly trump the conservative

[DonViejo]

Robert Shrum

The sign-up deadline for the Affordable Care Act has arrived, and in looking back at the last century of presidential power actions on both party sides Robert Shrum has reached a bigger conclusion: the progressive truly trump the conservative.

The sign-up deadline for the Affordable Care Act has triggered a predictable series of jeremiads from the right. Perhaps the most remarkable appeared (no surprise) on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal with Daniel Henninger’s portentous, supposedly comprehensive indictment: “The political left can win elections, but it’s unable to govern.” Henninger’s ambition here vastly exceeds his actual argument.

He assails health reform with a politically shopworn cliche about a “one grand scheme fits all compulsion… out of sync with individualization” in this age of technology. That glosses with modernity the 19th century laissez fair case against economic and social justice. It also happens to be outright false. As Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Robert Pear write in the New York Times, ”… six months after its troubled online exchanges opened for business, the program… looks less like a sweeping federal overhaul than a collection of individual ventures playing out unevenly, state to state, in the laboratories of democracy.” Part of this is a reflection of the shameful fact that in 19 states, ideological, tea-drenched governors and legislatures have denied

Medicaid coverage to millions. But part of it is intended: Everyone else has a choice of plans on exchanges that span the private marketplace. The only thing you can’t choose is nothing—or else you pay a fine.

Henninger shies away from the obvious, justified censure about the program’s botched rollout, perhaps because things are now “actually going well": the percentage of uninsured Americans is declining, over 3 million Americans under the age of 26 are on their parents’ policies, and millions of individuals, 6 million and counting, are choosing policies through national and state exchanges. Simply put, the website works—and it appears Obamacare does—and will—too. (Some Democrats duck the phrase Obamacare given the President’s current ratings; I suppose that decades from now, Republicans who will be forced to pledge themselves to the law will call it something else.)

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http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/03/30/100-years-of-right-and-left-moves.html