The Redistribution of Health

Shika Dalmia has written an excellent essay for Forbes that homes in on the Democrats’ mad rush to nationalize health care.

… egged on by the progressive punditocracy, Democrats are behaving as if, once they jam ObamaCare through, nothing else matters. It's like they'll never have to worry about being the minority party in need of constitutional checks and balances.

A sensible president would of course step in and provide some adult supervision to a wayward party hell-bent on jumping off this cliff. But the problem is that President Obama believes in his own messianism too deeply for that. His goal is not to remake his party as it could be but "remake this world as it should be." In his book Dreams From My Father Obama gives the distinct impression that his gifts are too great for the smallness of our political stage. He regrets not having been born during the civil rights era when the grandness of the cause would have measured up to the grandness of his ambition. He is in search of something big that will allow him to make his mark on the world as Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King did. Hence, the defeat of ObamaCare would not just be par for the course in the rough-and-tumble world of politics for him. It would be sign of his ordinariness, his mortality, and that, to him, is unendurable.

There you have it. A president who is willing to write off more than two and a quarter centuries of American experience, and to scrap the hard-won patrimony of personal liberty, because he is terrified that he would otherwise fail to rise above the lowing herd. This Christ figure without the inconvenience of a cross is going to redeem us through the all-encompassing power of his self-love. I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the progressive paradise except through me. Be my sheep.

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Unfortunately, our president does not lack for apostles. David Brooks’ Obamaphilia is on display again this week with a column that is filled with even more clueless nincompoopery than usual. Claiming that both conservatives and liberals have gotten Obama wrong, Brooks provides a description of the president which, if it had been used by a police artist to sketch a criminal suspect, would have left the malefactor perfectly at liberty, to walk the streets without let or hindrance from the constabulary, indefinitely:

The fact is, Obama is as he always has been, a center-left pragmatic reformer. Every time he tries to articulate a grand philosophy — from his book “The Audacity of Hope” to his joint-session health care speech last September — he always describes a moderately activist government restrained by a sense of trade-offs. He always uses the same on-the-one-hand-on-the-other sentence structure. Government should address problems without interfering with the dynamism of the market.

Demonizing health insurance providers and insurers, freezing out the Republicans in discussions of reform, angling for the ultimate goal of nationalizing health care, proposing taxes and deficits that will cripple the private sector and diminish the quality of life not only of the present, but of future, generations , truckling to the climate-change fanatics, taking over a large part of the automotive industry, filling his administration with ideologues and parasitical lobbyists– this is “moderately activist government”?

He has tried to find this balance in a town without an organized center — in a town in which liberals chair the main committees and small-government conservatives lead the opposition. He has tried to do it in a context maximally inhospitable to his aims.

But he has done it with tremendous tenacity. Readers of this column know that I’ve been critical on health care and other matters. Obama is four clicks to my left on most issues. He is inadequate on the greatest moral challenge of our day: the $9.7 trillion in new debt being created this decade. He has misread the country, imagining a hunger for federal activism that doesn’t exist. But he is still the most realistic and reasonable major player in Washington [emphasis mine].

Why, yes, as a matter of fact I can spell “non sequitur”. Or is Brooks speaking in a purely relative sense, as if to say that in the realm of palsied cutpurses, the man with dexterous hands is king? Surely, the country deserves a better choice than that.

He closes with the inevitable lamentation over the tunnel vision exhibited by us outside-the-beltway rubes:

In a sensible country, people would see Obama as a president trying to define a modern brand of moderate progressivism. In a sensible country, Obama would be able to clearly define this project without fear of offending the people he needs to get legislation passed. But we don’t live in that country. We live in a country in which many people live in information cocoons in which they only talk to members of their own party and read blogs of their own sect. They come away with perceptions fundamentally at odds with reality, fundamentally misunderstanding the man in the Oval Office.

In a sensible country, David Brooks would be stocking shelves with dribble glasses in a novelty shop. As it is, one wonders how long Brooks plans to continue pupating in his own information cocoon. If he ever emerges, no doubt the hapless fellow will flutter directly into the jaws of a praying mantis.

Update Congressman Mike Pence: "A minority in Congress plus the American people equals a majority."