Updated from the earlier article in March 2017
“I predict it will be an issue where people start looking at the critics and say, ‘What was all that yelling and screaming about? I think you must have misinformed us about the Affordable Care Act”
Former Kentucky Governor Steve Beshear 2013
The Republican Party’s 2009 decision to mock the black president through the clever weaponization of the Affordable Care Act --- nicknaming the law “Obamacare” in order to fire up what some called “Obama Derangement Syndrome”, in order to feed an angry hate-filled base --- has backfired once again. Surely the Republicans had no reason to oppose a bill based upon their own plan (which by the way, is so desperately needed in many of the communities that they serve) in the first place. However, they were adamant from the very beginning that the Affordable Care Act (ACA) --- passed during the most productive congress since LBJ’s Great Society (1964 - 1965), is a “bad law” that “cost jobs” and needs to be “repealed and replaced”. They often addressed the law as if it were an unruly slave that at the very least needed to be “fixed” and this was long before the law was fully implemented. Of course, they also vowed from the very beginning never to work with the black president on anything at all and for eight years in this regard they did for the most part keep their word. “Whatever he is for, we are against!” they proudly proclaimed out loud. Thus, after holding more than 40 hearings over a ten-month period, Democrats fashioned a law based upon a Republican plan allowing more than 100 Republican amendments only to see it pass with zero Republican votes. Republicans still vehemently opposed the law and continued to mock the black president. They took their pathological hatred and disrespect for President Obama to such an extreme that Congressman Pete Sessions (R-TX) during a White House meeting in October 2012 reportedly told President Obama to his face “I cannot even stand to look at you! “ And of course, Congressman Joe Wilson famously became a conservative darling for yelling out: “You lie”, interrupting the president in the middle of a 2009 speech in front of a Joint Session of Congress. But, perhaps most revealing of all, former Florida Governor Charlie Christ and New Jersey Governor Chris Christi were both ostracized, if not quarantined for simply “touching” the black president. For eight long years, they qualified their opposition to the Affordable Care Act by mocking the man and now the time has now come for them to “put up“ or “shut up!”
And yet, after making “Repeal and Replace Obamacare!” their sacred war cry and central organizing principle throughout the Obama presidency ---- first, in March on the seven-year anniversary of the passage of the Affordable Care Act, House leader Paul Ryan was forced to postpone a vote on the Republican bill. Unlike the second O.J. Simpson jury, acting out of spite to symbolically time a vote to repeal the ACA did not work out for them. Twenty-four hours later, unable to gather enough Republican votes, Ryan was forced to pull the bill from the floor, dealing President Trump a major legislative defeat. Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi chided Ryan and Trump calling it a “rookie mistake”. Of course, Ryan was ultimately able to coral enough Republican votes to get a bill across the finish line. But now in a kind of déjà vu all over again, Senator Mitch “Our goal is to make Obama a one term president” McConnell (R-KY) has failed to pass a so called “skinny bill”, a kind of Trojan Horse piece of legislation reminiscent of the 2013 budget sequester which was never meant to become law.
How could this happen? After nearly a decade of such bitter rancor and vitriol, how could the Republican plan to repeal and replace Obamacare fail? For so many years, Republicans displayed little if any shame while often making a true spectacle of themselves before the entire world ---- threatening the world’s economy, refusing to raise the debt ceiling and pay the nation’s bills, shutting down the federal government (a stunt that cost the American people 24 billion ---- at the same time they refused to pass a 24 billion extension of unemployment insurance for those that were put out of work under their watch ---- “I’m just saying!”) testing the morale of a nation already besieged by a near-unprecedented financial crisis and two never-ending wars ---- a party steeped in such bitterness, such angry partisan rhetoric, such routine ad hominen attacks upon a beloved President of the United States (long before Donald Trump, Republican leaders were publicly praising Russian President Vladimir Putin, calling him a “stronger leader” than our “weak president”) after eight years and sixty-six bills in congress to “repeal and replace” Obamacare, in 2017, seven months into the Trump presidency, the Republican Party has arrived in control of all three levers of power, behaving like the “Congress That Couldn’t Shoot Straight” with no real consensus piece of legislation that can even pass their own majorities in both houses of Congress? After eight years of their relentless lynch-mob-like harassment of the nation’s first black president, in a rather extraordinary way, we are watching the Republican Party reap what it has sowed. This would be hilarious, if it were not such an insult to the American people.
Writing in Politico, four days before the House was scheduled to vote on their replacement Republican bill, the American Health Care Act (“Trumpcare”), Michael Greenwald summed up the issue this way:
Their basic problem is that hardly anyone likes their repeal-and-replace legislation. The Congressional Budget Office found that it would increase the uninsured rolls by 24 million, [14 million next year alone!] cut Medicaid by 25 percent and jack up premiums for older Americans, while delivering a gigantic tax cut for the richest Americans. Groups representing doctors, hospitals, patients and seniors all came out against it. Democrats in Congress all hate it, and quite a few Republicans believe its Medicaid cuts are far too severe, while quite a few other Republicans believe its Medicaid cuts aren’t severe enough, GOP leaders are now scrambling to try to salvage it, but the more Americans hear about it, the more they seem to prefer Obamacare (03.20.2017).
In 2001 angry protestors pelted Bush The Younger’s limousine with eggs, gaining the new president the distinction of being the first president forced to stay in his vehicle instead of walking along the parade route during his Inauguration. However, it is another Republican, Donald Trump that bares the distinction of being the president whose Inauguration spurned the greatest single day of concerted non-violent protest in the United States. Yet, even though the Women’s March drew 2 million people to Washington D.C. and 2 million more to dozens of cities around the country and around the world, loud and often angry protests had been occurring in every district throughout the country weeks before Inauguration Day. As senators and representative held town hall meetings during recess, they were getting an earful from their constituents fearful that their healthcare was going to be taken away. Within just a few weeks, the Affordable Care Act “Obamacare” went from a favorability rating of 48% to 54% and rising, while 67% of Americans opposed repealing Obamacare. By the time Paul Ryan pulled the American Health Care Act, the first version of “Trumpcare”, from the floor of the House of Representatives, it had a meager 17% approval rating with the American people and it has only become worse with the senate plan. President Trump had a historically low favorable rating languishing at just 37%, while 57% of the American people had an unfavorable view of him.
The 2016 election was a seminal moment in American politics. This was the “Angry White Man’s Election”, what Michael Kimmel calls “aggrieved entitlement” redeemed by the election of Donald Trump. Nonetheless, it is a ritual deep within American culture that the super rich has always nurtured the ability to turn the white poor and working class into peons voting against their own self-interest, while blaming people of color for their own misfortunes. Three hundred members of the one percent convinced more than a million poor southerners to fight an army twice its size during the Civil War in order to protect the Slaveocracy, only for them to return home to communities devastated by war and blame ex-slaves for all their troubles. It is a fact that Joe the Plummer had more economically in common with Senator Barack Obama’s policies than he did with Senator John McCain’s. However, in America sometimes that simply does not matter. Ronald Reagan created the racist image of the lazy Welfare Queen enriching herself on the public dole, even though white women are the largest recipients of Welfare. Nevertheless, this became an iconic sub-conscious image that gave license to white working class fears and anxieties ---- however real or imagined. This is what former Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA) was referring to when he told his constituents “We don’t want to give black people other people’s money!” It is the seduction of cultural projection that makes the white working poor peculiar frontline troops in the war of the one percent against the American poor, working and middle class. “Culture, said President Reagan’s Secretary of Education, William “abort all black babies” Bennett (“who’s watching your children?”) ---- Is more important that politics”.
Over the first 64 days of the Trump presidency, many white rural working-class and northern blue-collar communities, in states as diverse as Michigan, Missouri, Pennsylvania and West Virginia, where 57% or more in many instances voted for Donald Trump ---- came into perilous conflict with the reality of their own rhetoric and the idea that they might loose the health care insurance that Obamacare made affordable to them for the very first time. Joy Reid of AM Joy on MSNBC made it plain:
“You had people protesting all over the country and that scared the beejesus out of the Republicans” (03.25.2017)
Take the state of Kentucky for instance. It is a deep red state. Trump won Kentucky by 30%. Nevertheless, in 2013 Kentucky had one of the most successful implementations of the Affordable Care Act. Former Democratic Governor Steve Beshear expanded Medicaid and set up one of the best state exchanges in the country; called KYNECT. Kentuckians fell in love with their new healthcare system. Today one-third of Kentuckians are on Medicaid and the uninsured rate has fallen from 20% to 6%. Under the state-run system more than 500,000 people gained health insurance that did not previously have it. By all measures Kentucky was an Obamacare success story. But, this is because the program was marketed in a way that most people did not know that their popular new healthcare insurance program was actually Obamacare. In almost the same breath, Kentuckians would tell you just how much they hated Obamacare and love KYNECT. This schizophrenic suicidal delusion led them in 2015 to elect a Republican governor who promised to “repeal and replace Obamacare!”
Republicans came into power and found themselves in quite a conundrum, facing a constituency feted with a dubious love-hate relationship with the Affordable Care Act. But, the reason for this as mentioned above is quite simple. Their opposition to Obamacare was never really about healthcare in the first place. The American people were being hoodwinked. Early on, rightwing opposition to the Affordable Care Act was masked in a symbolic appeal to repeal and replace not the “law” (ACA), but the “man” (President Obama). Their relentless cries of outrage towards the 2010 Republican-inspired legislation never made sense. It was all a hoax and it was their often over-the-top bombast that gave them away. It was an expression of their real hatred for the very idea of a black man in the White House, simply using the law as an inconspicuous vehicle to mock the black president. It was about nurturing a widespread tissue rejection for a black family in the Whitehouse; made plain through word and deed by the Psychopathic Racial Personality throughout the Obama Presidency, though often ignored (“Let’s Make The Whitehouse White Again!”) by the “mainstream press”. It was about rejecting the very idea of diversity and the wholesale repeal of the twenty-first century.
From unfounded rumors of “death panels” in 2010 to cries of the ACA’s impending “death spiral” in 2017, an enormous body of mythology has always surrounded the Affordable Care Act, even as its practical application has helped to enrich the lives of more than 22 million Americans who never had healthcare insurance before and millions more who for the first time are finding out that being a woman is not a pre-existing condition, or are now able to carry their adult children up to age 26 on their healthcare plan. However, with the nation’s broadcast news’s media focused on the continuous political campaign and all of a sudden weary of real journalism, the loudest voices in the Republican Party succeed throughout the Obama presidency in a campaign of ritual delusion that simply overwhelmed the administration’s ability to adequately respond without impeding the true work of governing. What many newsrooms seemed to forget during Obama’s presidency, is that fact checking ---- not myth-making is the true work of the fourth estate. .
The decisive roll played by “big news” in the election of Donald Trump should never be in dispute. And now, the worst part of the media’s behavior during the Obama years has backfired as well. After becoming a major beneficiary of an over-zealous news media seemingly bent upon manufacturing an air of scandal around the Obama Presidency, the new president has condemned the “mainstream news” as “fake news”. And, much of the public seems to agree. After all, who better to level such a critique than the carnival barker who fed them an endless stream of nonsense in the first place? “Trump may be bad for the country, said CBS chairman Bob Bobel, but he’s great for CBS”. All of a sudden, the American mainstream media finds itself hostage to a megalomaniac as skilled in manufacturing reality as they are. Reduced to a little more than a vaudevillian platform for a reality TV show gone bad, as bloggers now do the real work of serious journalism, it is Donald Trump who now sets the agenda for the 24/7 news’s cycle. Welcome to this brave new world of Kim Kardashian meets Bill O’Reilly ---- reality television meets reality TV news, a place where real journalism often goes to die.
Nonetheless, the truth is, Americans are fond of Obamacare. The Republicans own the store and the “mainstream news business” owns the 2016 election. Republicans control the presidency, both houses of congress and they have a conservative majority in the Supreme Court. They have elected a man steeped in white nationalism who is the very embodiment of the persistent, loud and angry white backlash that must be a part of any credible retelling of the Obama presidency. From demanding to see his birth certificate to accusing him of wire-taping his campaign offices to a host of other indignities in-between, Donald Trump has always displayed a peculiar --- if not bizarre obsession with President Obama. His outlandish claim that President Obama wiretapped Trump Tower during the 2016 election can only be seen as a ploy to continue to feed the beast of his own derangement. It is a way for Trump to connect on a subconscious level with his “basket of deplorables” still trafficking in cultural resentment, racism and a blatant disrespect for the former president, even as he has left office with an approval rating at 60%, third only to Clinton (1993-2001) who left office with an approval rating at 66% and Reagan (1981–1989) who left office with an approval rating at 63%. The true motive for their frenzied opposition was made clear in early 2014. Asked why Republicans voted so many times to repeal “Obamacare” (the Affordable Care Act) former House Speaker Jon Boehner offered a rather juvenile, however revealing response, “Some of our members he said, haven’t had a chance to vote against it yet”.