Obama’s Original Contribution To The Science Of Governing

Obama first claimed national attention by his keynote address to the 2004 Democratic convention. (Even I was impressed!)  Who can forget his moving paean to comity and national unity:

The pundits, the pundits like to slice and dice our country into red states and blue States: red states for Republicans, blue States for Democrats. But I’ve got news for them, too. We worship an awesome God in the blue states, and we don’t like federal agents poking around our libraries in the red states.

We coach little league in the blue states and, yes, we’ve got some gay friends in the red states.

(APPLAUSE)

There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq, and there are patriots who supported the war in Iraq.

We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.

Apparently he can, since by design he’s been one of the most divisive presidents in our history. The two classic forms of political divisiveness are based on class and race, and Obama has excelled at both.

Claiming that the greedy rich “don’t pay their fair share” is by now such a standard part of Democratic fare that it sounds rather tame, but Obama has all too often replaced criticism of the rich with outright invective. “You didn’t build that” wasn’t even the worse. Remember the doctors who unnecessarily removed tonsils so they could collect the fee? Or the surgeons who unnecessarily amputate a diabetic’s foot for the “$30,000, $40,000, or $50,000” fee they collect “immediately” as opposed to “a family care physician works with his or her patient to help them lose weight, modify diet, monitors whether they’re taking their medications in a timely fashion, they might get reimbursed a pittance.” And let’s not forget all those “bad apple” insurers who had the gall to obey Obamacare regulations and cancel all those “inferior” insurance products they had foisted off on an unsuspecting public.

On race he’s been just as bad, never having seen a race preference he opposed. What he has opposed is state initiatives requiring that state governments treat all individuals without regard to race or ethnicity. And just last week, as recounted here, his Department of Justice and Department of Education instructed the nation’s K-12 schools that they would be investigated for racial discrimination if school punishments had a “disparate impact” on protected minority groups, i.e., even “when they evenhandedly implement facially neutral policies and practices that, although not adopted with the intent to discriminate, nonetheless have an unjustified effect of discriminating against students on the basis of race.”

Nothing new here; demagogues have long stirred up racial and class antagonisms to protect and enhance their power. Obama, however, not content with traditional forms of divisiveness, deserves credit (or at least recognition) for pioneering a new and original form — pitting the healthy against the sick. Here is Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber, as quoted in the Washington Post:

Jonathan Gruber, a key architect of the health law and a professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said the number of people covered by small-group policies that will be discontinued is “not trivial.”

“We’re ending discrimination [against people who are sick, and as a result] the people who were previously benefiting may now suffer,” Gruber said. “That’s sad for them, but it does not mean we should continue discrimination.”

It is by now all too well known that Obamacare charges healthy people more for insurance that is required to cover “benefits” many don’t need or want in order to subsidize those who, for whatever reason, lack insurance. (Nancy Pelosi was wrong: passing the bill was not sufficient to teach us what is in it, but having it applied to us has been a strict and effective teacher.)

In fact, there’s more here than the innovative originality of pitting the healthy against the sick. Since many of healthy are young and many of the sick are old, Obama’s original contribution is actually a twofer, adding young v. old to healthy v. sick.