Posted on 11/01/2013 7:24:03 AM PDT by Kaslin
Often in error but never in doubt, Barack Obama could walk into the Rose Garden and step on a half-dozen rakes like Foghorn Leghorn in an old Looney Tunes cartoon, and the official line would be, "He meant to do that."
And the amazing thing is that so many people believe it. "Mr. Obama is like a championship chess player, always several moves ahead of friend and foe alike. He's smart, deft, elegant and subtle," proclaimed then-New York Times columnist Bob Herbert in 2009. It's an image of the president that his biggest fans, in and out of the press, have been terribly reluctant to relinquish -- because it confirms the faith they invested in him. Nobody every likes to admit they were suckered.
But the fiction of Obama as a man three steps ahead has taken a terrible beating if you have eyes to see it. The budget cuts under the so-called sequester are the law of the land because Obama thought he was outthinking his opponents when he gave budget-cutters budget cuts. Now he's stuck railing against his own idea. His allegedly revolutionary decision to turn his presidential campaign into a personal political organization independent from the Democratic Party has turned out to be the most expensive way ever to generate smarmy and ineffectual e-mail spam. And, if you want to believe that Obama's goal in Syria all along was to elevate Vladimir Putin and alienate all of our Middle East allies, including Saudi Arabia and Israel, to make Bashar al-Assad our strategic partner while he finds more politically correct ways to slaughter his own people, well, that's nice.
Or consider Obama's only clear-cut political victory since his re-election. Republican demands were a bit of a moving target, but basically the GOP wanted either an all-out repeal of Obamacare or, as a fallback, a one-year delay of the individual mandate. By the end, they would have taken even less.
But Obama wouldn't consider it. Instead, he played hardball with everything from national park closures to, temporarily at least, denying death benefits to military families. As the debt ceiling loomed, the GOP relented. Conventional wisdom says Obama won, and I basically agree with the conventional wisdom.
Or at least I did. There's something those of us scoring that bout didn't know: The president desperately, urgently and indisputably needed to delay the rollout of Obamacare.
This is not a matter open to fair-minded dispute, never mind partisan disagreement. Even the president and Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius agree that the rollout of Obamacare has been a "debacle" (Sebelius' word). Revelations in the press and in congressional hearings show that the administration was warned prior to both the shutdown and the Obamacare debut that Healthcare.gov was as ready to go live as a kid's make-believe refrigerator-box submarine was ready to explore the ocean depths.
If Obama were a chess master -- or even a fairly adept checkers novice -- he would have known that when you're not ready to do something incredibly important, it's best to buy time. He could have traded a delay (Three months? Six months?) for some major budget concessions, maybe even lifting the sequester. Perhaps his base wouldn't have liked it, but he could have easily spun the compromise as a necessity given how irrational and "extreme" the GOP was being.
Publicly he'd say he was paying a ransom to "kidnappers" and "hostage takers." He'd denounce Republicans for delaying precious insurance coverage for sick kids and frail oldsters just to score partisan and ideological points.
But privately, ah privately, the master strategist would be stroking his proverbial white cat -- or, in reality, his hypoallergenic black dog -- while breathing a sigh of relief that he bought himself some time to fix his woefully mangled healthcare reform.
Obviously he wouldn't want to delay Obamacare. But that decision was out of his hands due to his administration's incompetence. The only choice before him was whether he would get the blame for the delay or if the Republicans would.
Why Obama didn't do this and why it didn't occur to him are good questions. Hubris obviously played a role, as it does in nearly everything this White House does. But the best answer is he didn't know how terrible things were over at HHS. In other words, the chess master didn't even know what pieces he had on the board, which is usually not something we associate with chess masters. It's something we associate with people who don't even know how to play the game
Heck, he's been making the point all week this is part of Obama’s grand plan. Chaos...pure and simple.
Adolph Obama must go!
His chess prowess is on par with my daughter's pet chicken.
But hey, at least the eggs she lays have use.
Do you seriously think for one minute that if the media turned on him and simply reported the news, he would resemble anything more than the shallow thinking, US hating racist that he is?
No chess master?
I like to see Obozo checkmated out of office.
Obama is dumber than donuts. The only man ever to look at a chess board and ask if he can be the banker.
“Yes it most certainly does prove he is a chess master.
His goal is to collapse the current system via chaos, and that is exactly what he is doing.”
He’s a chess master in the sense that he was invited to play, began to lose, and - with a mighty swing of his arm - swept all the pieces off the board and declared himself the winner.
That’s what petulant children acting like wannabe dictators do.
While I think single payer is the ultimate goal of Obama, I don’t believe he was hoping to achieve it by chaos (although that might be how it works out). I think he was planning on setting up Obamacare without problem, then slowly squeeze the insurance companies out of business with regulations.
Insurance companies saw $$$ signs so were all too willing to go along. Wouldn’t you love to sell a product everyone HAD to buy?
They won’t say a word to discourage people from signing up. They need people to believe their doors are open wide for business.
Insurers will set their 2015 premiums based on what’s on the books by about mid 2014. If it’s a disaster by mid 2014, the death spiral of rapidly increasing costs will thwart enrollment even further.
They lay down with dogs and they are frantically trying to avoid fleas. They do not want a mandate delay at all.
Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will bury you.
Nikita Khrushchev, remark at the Polish embasy in Moscow, Nov. 18, 1956I once said, "We will bury you," and I got into trouble with it. Of course we will not bury you with a shovel. Your own working class will bury you.
Nikita Khrushchev, Speech in Yugoslavia, Aug. 24, 1963
Yep. Two separate factors.
If they don’t think ahead they’ll end up like the anti Cruz faction of the GOP.
Fleas and all
I agree with you. Although I believe the mandate is unconstitutional, it might have worked for a time if it hadn’t been watered down . Allowing people to opt out with a nominal penalty had to be included to win passage. But the opt out provision will be the death knell of the whole bill.
There will not be enough healthy people signing up to offset costs for those who are sick or receiving subsidies.
Obamacare was intended to be a step toward single payer , but it totally ignored the principle of math and the reality of human nature, I. E. People are all for “altruism” as long as they aren’t the ones paying for it.
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Khrushchev still had it wrong. Not the working class. The "give me" class has "barryed" us.
Just like some doctors and hospitals are doing, insurers could pull out of the exchanges. But they are still hog tied by all the additional coverage requirements inherent in the law.
I don’t see how premiums for even the most basic policies don’t skyrocket, leading people to forego insurance in favor of fee for service.
Only the largest insurers have a shot at surviving.
I also expect doctors to be creative and come up with “maintenance” options for a yearly fee.
Eventually, my hope is that health insurance reverts to exactly that - insurance against catastrophic loss only. But that would require a repeal of obamacare, which will not occur any time soon.
America has repealed constitutional amendments. A law failing at the speed and magnitude of Obamacare most certainly can be repealed.
Obama is as much a chess master as a pigeon strutting around the board, knocking all the pieces over.
Every time I see that horsey smile my blood pressure shoots through the roof. How I despise him.
If he is such a “chess master”, then WHY are CHINESE NUKE BOOMER SUBMARINES AND INTELLIGENCE SHIPS SITTING WITHIN RANGE OF THE COASTLINE OF THE HAWAIIAN ISLANDS???
I certainly hope so. It wasnt easy to defund it - that effort failed. This will not be easy
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