Obama’s future hangs on 2010 mid-term elections
by Bob Hoig, Publisher
Midlands Business Journal
You hear a lot of punditry about how this or that program is key to President Obama’s re-election in 2012.
His problem is that 10 comes before 12.
If even one house of Congress slips into Republican hands in the November 2010 mid-term elections, Obama’s legislative mischief will stop.
Goodbye to 1,000-page bailout bills and other “trust me” proposals guided unread and opaque by Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid to the president’s desk.
Hoping to avoid just such a happening, the biggest guns of the political left are assembling.
Nobel Peace Prize judges probably think they helped Obama by honoring him for his all hat and no cattle non-achievements. Some Americans will still be snickering over that one right up to the mid-terms. Making a politician a laughingstock takes scissors to his coattails for helping endangered Democrats.
Rushing health care as Obama wants has been a dubious strategy. It carries more than a dollop of ridicule. Before the August recess, Americans will remember, changing health care had to occur right now! Obama told us there was no time nor need to reflect or even read the bill.
In view of the many legitimate questions that have come up as more is known about Obama’s worldview and government bloated role in it, it is doubly scary to think what would have haunted American health care and health insurance had that version of Obamacare gone through.
Obama’s penchant for street theater is a turnoff. His stunt of bringing a group of longtime, politically pro-Obama doctors to the White House, in white coats even, was so easy to see through as to invite mockery.
If only the legislative language in the health bills floating around Congress were that transparent.
A full backfire seems in progress within some major industry groups once thought to be in Obama’s bag — pharmacy, insurance, hospitals, doctors.
White House promises that each industry would get special favors through expense caps in exchange for their donations for advertising and PR to help Obamacare seems to have fallen into the fine print.
With today’s wolfish spending habits among Washington, D.C. politicians, one party control of both the legislative and executive branches defies common sense – in reference to mounting multi-trillion dollar deficits, to health care change that cannot be funded going forward, to stimulus packages, to cap and trade legislation.
We recommend Thomas Sowell’s column this week (see page 16) for its insights on why people make wise decisions because they are close to their own needs and why politicians, being far away and self-serving, do not.
Medicare and Medicaid programs are going broke on separate timetables. Will the health care insurance program the Democrats offer fare any better?
Why Congressional Budget Office scores the Baucus Bill just released by the Senate Finance Committee as revenue neutral, give or take $81 billion, is anybody’s guess.
The budgeters seem to favor a formula that counts revenues for 10 years from now, assuming the bill passes now, but takes into account expenses for only seven years, because the bill does not go into effect until 2013.
Try taking that business plan to a bank. Huh?
Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich, doesn’t always measure up in these quarters, but he hit the target in a comment on the hefty tomes favored by the Obama White House.
Members don’t read them, Conyers said, because they are too massive and, besides, the language is such legalese and jargon no can understand them anyway.
For now, we’re calling him “Honest John.”
October 2009
