Last week Obama’s re-election team released a television ad in a
variety of battleground states listing the president’s
“accomplishments.” A shameless knockoff of Ronald Reagan’s famous
“morning in America” spot, this preposterous piece of
propaganda begins with the administration’s standard complaint
about the economic crisis Obama “inherited” and goes on to claim
that he somehow saved the country because, “He believed in us.
Fought for us.” What he really believes about us, however, is
better illustrated by what is missing from the ad. It contains no
mention whatsoever of Obamacare, the health care “reform” law that
Obama and his supporters have, until the beginning of the current
election cycle, referred to as a “historic” piece of legislation
and his “most important domestic achievement.”
Such a glaring omission suggests the president and his advisors
believe the voters are too dumb to remember that he and his
congressional accomplices wasted a year cobbling together their
unconstitutional health care boondoggle while unemployment raged
out of control. It isn’t simply that Obama did nothing about the
jobs problem while expending an enormous amount of time and no
small amount of taxpayer money on backroom deals like the
“Cornhusker kickback.” He ignored the pleas of the voters to set
health reform aside until he had done something about an
unemployment rate that was skyrocketing. At the time, even
progressive bastions like the Huffington Post
lamented that Obama “forced a health care bill at the expense
of vitally needed focus on job creation.”
The absence of Obamacare from the president’s new campaign ad
does not mean, however, that the White House itself has forgotten
about the ironically titled Affordable Care Act. Obama’s reelection
team is still trying to exploit it via low-profile initiatives
intended to spread the good news without making the president or
his surrogates actually talk about it. Thus, on Mother’s Day, the
White House web site featured special e-cards ostensibly designed
to help people “show some appreciation for the mom in your life,”
including one
that begins, “Happy Mother’s Day from the Affordable Care Act,”
and proceeds to point out that, “Being a mom isn’t a pre-existing
condition. It’s a joy.” Can you imagine the “joy” your mother would
have experienced had you sent something like this to her on
Sunday?
I’m not sure that even the most glassy-eyed Obamazombie is
stupid enough to give his mom an Obamacare e-card on Mother’s Day,
but it’s clear that Obama and his minions believe such people
exist. It’s also obvious that the president’s men think voters are
clueless enough to believe the phony statistics listed on the
e-card about how women have already benefited from “reform,” and
how these alleged goodies are somehow free of charge. And the
contempt with which the Obama crew views the electorate naturally
precludes any fear that some recipient of the Obamacare missive
will know that the Supreme Court is about to strike down the
guaranteed issue provision of the law and thus render the e-card’s
claims about pre-existing conditions as empty as the president’s
2008 promises.
Ironically, the president’s empty promises will be the undoing
of the Obamacare provision that forbids discrimination pursuant to
pre-existing conditions. In 2008, Obama promised not to support an
individual mandate. The president’s failure to keep his word,
combined with the unconstitutionality of the mandate, is what
landed Obamacare in the Supreme Court and forced his solicitor
general to tell the justices that the guaranteed issue and
community rating provisions of the law must be invalidated if the
mandate is struck down. But the president’s re-election team no
doubt believes the voters have forgotten his brazen flip-flop on
the individual mandate, just as they believe we have forgotten his
various flip-flops on gay marriage.
Obama and his accomplices certainly believe the voters are too
clueless to remember his promises that Obamacare would reduce
health insurance premiums, or to notice that our health care costs
are still increasing at twice the rate of inflation. Likewise, they
believe the public is too dumb to remember the president’s promise
that his economic policies would prevent unemployment from reaching
8 percent, or to notice that average unemployment during his first
term has exceeded 9 percent. And they obviously believe that the
voters don’t have enough sense to remember how badly they wanted
Obama and the Democrat-controlled Congress to give up their health
care obsession and focus on the most serious issue facing the
country then and now.
The president and his men are wrong. The voters want lower
unemployment, lower gas prices, lower federal deficits, and genuine
health reform. And public opinion surveys
suggest that red herrings are not going to change these
priorities. Nor will slick ads that claim Obama “fought for us.”
The reality is that he has fought against us on health
reform and any number of other issues. And attempts to shove
disasters like Obamacare down the memory hole aren’t going to work.
The voters are smarter than the president and his minions
think.
