Greek tragedy is all about hubris \u2014 overweening pride and how it brings men down.\u00a0 Hubris could be the story of the coming week in Washington but not for the reasons most think.<\/p>\n
As the whole world knows, this city is fixated on a standoff between the president and Congressional Republicans (all in the House, some in the Senate) over Obamacare. \u00a0As of late Sunday night, reports were that Congressional Democrats and the president were refusing to compromise or to even talk.\u00a0 \u201cRunning out the clock\u201d was the Drudge Report\u2019s overnight lead headline about the Democrats\u2019 stance.<\/p>\n
The Democrats clearly believe they don\u2019t need to compromise.\u00a0 If a government shutdown comes, the media will blame the GOP \u2013 a perfect set up for their 2014 drive to take back the House.<\/p>\n
After all, the GOP took the blame not just with the media but with the public at large during the 1995-6 stand off between Congressional Republicans and the Clinton Administration.\u00a0\u00a0 But in three key ways, today is entirely different from the mid-1990s.\u00a0 And these differences all have roots in a hubris that could produce very different results.<\/p>\n
The first difference is the reason for the shutdown.\u00a0 In the mid-90s, the standoff was about overall spending, an important issue, to be sure, but not at that time as intensely compelling Obamacare is now.\u00a0 Despite the president\u2019s taunting characterization of GOP intent \u2013 wanting, he says, to keep millions from receiving health insurance \u2014 Obamacare is deeply unpopular throughout the country and has been from the first.<\/p>\n
Deep unpopularity was why in 2009 the White House had to resort to not quite legitimate methods to ram the bill through a Senate that it controlled.\u00a0 Those tactics \u2013 including hounding Alaska senator Ted Stevens out of office on bogus charges \u2013 are among the reasons the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare\u2019s official title) has never enjoyed full legitimacy.<\/p>\n
And if anything, its legitimacy has declined since its passage.\u00a0 Nancy Pelosi\u2019s infamous \u201cWe have to pass the bill to find out what\u2019s in it,\u201d looks more prescient and prideful by the day.\u00a0 The Catholic bishops supported the law\u2019s passage, only to find that it endangered core tenants of the faith.\u00a0 Private sector unions supported it, only to find that its sloppy design is forcing full-time employees to go part time, destroying the 40-hour workweek for tens of millions of Americans.\u00a0\u00a0 Many major corporations supported it, only to be surprised that the president\u2019s \u201cif you like it, you can keep it\u201d pledge about their existing health insurance plans was in practice untenable.<\/p>\n
Difference number two from 1995-6 is lead spokespeople.\u00a0 Much to the disgust of many in his own party, Ted Cruz has gone on point in the Senate.\u00a0 As he demonstrated on yesterday\u2019s\u00a0Meet the Press<\/i>, Cruz is a far more talented spokesperson than any the GOP fielded two decades ago.\u00a0 Much of the party is ticked with him and perhaps with reason.\u00a0 But since Ronald Reagan left the White House, no Republican has stood up to the kind of questioning to which David Gregory subjected Cruz and come out so well.\u00a0 The Texas senator won every point and did so without a moment\u2019s hesitation or dropping his smile.\u00a0 Democrats have come cockily to assume that with the mainstream media as air cover, they could dominate any issue battlefield.\u00a0 No more. There are other young GOP senators and governors like Cruz.\u00a0 The party is finding voice.\u00a0 It can make its case even under media fire.<\/p>\n
The third difference from the mid-1990s is that this Tuesday the long-awaited Obamacare health exchanges go live online.\u00a0 Over the next three months tens of millions of Americans will log on to sign up.\u00a0 For them and, by word of mouth, tens of millions more, the exchanges will become the first material sign of whether Obamacare is what the president has promised or the GOP has warned about.<\/p>\n
Democrats may have built a trap for themselves. The launch of Obamacare could prove an even bigger online fiasco than Mitt Romney\u2019s infamous Election Day get-out-the-vote super-program, Project Orca. Everyone presumes that Team Obama isn\u2019t as clueless about the web as was Romney\u2019s outfit. The hubris of White House and congressional Democrats is another matter.\u00a0 Without their realizing it, their intransigence even to the proposed one-year delay in implementation represents a huge bet on this software package will work the first time or soon thereafter.\u00a0 Even the package\u2019s developer (who has warned that using it could prove a \u201cthird-world experience\u201d) seems to fear that it won\u2019t.<\/p>\n
Will this week prove a Greek tragedy?\u00a0 Stay tuned.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Greek tragedy is all about hubris \u2014 overweening pride and how it brings men down.\u00a0 Hubris could be the story of the coming week in Washington but not for the reasons most think. As the whole world knows, this city is fixated on a standoff between the president and Congressional Republicans (all in the House, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[114,12,60,64,44],"class_list":["post-1667","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economic-policy-health-care","tag-cruz","tag-hugh-hewitt","tag-obama","tag-obamacare","tag-republicans"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1667","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1667"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1667\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1669,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1667\/revisions\/1669"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1667"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1667"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1667"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}