Volume 3, Number 120
When President Obama easily won an election that Republicans deemed was their just reward, Senator Mitch McConnell said in an interview with the National Journal on Oct. 29, 2010: “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”
Integral to that declaration was for Republicans to oppose every piece of legislation that President Obama wanted. And there was nothing that the President wanted more than the Affordable Care Act (ACA). His reasons for doing this was said to have focused on an intense personal experience. In the 1990s, in Hawaii, his mother was ill with uterine and ovarian cancer. According to his autobiography, she had difficulty in obtaining medical insurance coverage, which she finally did. That experience was said to have seared the young man.
Of course, President Obama had other good reasons to support the Act. Premiums were experiencing sky rocketing increases, one-fifth of the population were without coverage, insurance companies were refusing coverage based on pre-existing conditions, people who were sick could be dropped by their insurance company and young adults couldn’t afford coverage.
President Obama made the ACA into his priority, even overshadowing economic reform and the housing crisis. Despite a lukewarm acceptance by the general population, the President succeeded in narrowly ramming the ACA through a Democratic controlled Congress on March 23, 2010. It was a historic achievement.
This was not original thinking on the part of the president. Presidents had called for a government medical care act in some form going back to Franklin D. Roosevelt and every other president since then: Harry Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush. That makes it bipartisan since it included six Republican presidents and seven Democrats, if you include the one who finally did it: Barack Obama. It was a remarkable achievement; what they couldn’t achieve, he had.
The fact that Obama pulled it off while others had failed seemed to be too much for the Republican Party to bear. After all, it was generally recognized that if it stood the ACA would be his legacy, the very thing that defined his administration. If it was overturned, it would just be another footnote in history. Just the nickname Obamacare was seen by the right as a pejorative and by those who supported the ACA as an accolade. How much of the animosity directed at the Act was just political and how much was racism directed toward the country’s first black president is a question that warrants scrutiny.
Looking at the political arguments, according to The Economist of December 11, 2016, “Republican distaste exists for ideological, economic and historical reasons.
“Start with the ideological. The fundamental mechanism behind Obamacare—that Americans who can afford to buy insurance directly from a provider are charged higher premiums to help to pay for the subsidies provided to those who buy their coverage from government-run marketplaces—is the sort of redistributive economics that is anathema to the party of small government… Many conservatives see the drive for universal insurance as evidence of government meddling in the private doctor-patient relationship.
“Next, they argue that the economics of Obamacare do not stack up. Republicans argue that it represents the beginnings of market failure: (it leads to higher prices) that will deter healthy, young Americans from signing up, which means insurers will make further losses, which means prices will rise again and so on, until the system collapses.
“Lastly, many on the right view the ACA as the latest round in a multi-generational fight against state-proffered health care. The label of socialized medicine stuck as fast to Obamacare as it did to Truman’s plan.”
Another way to explain the divisiveness is since roughly half the country votes Republican, there is a natural slice of hatred for any Democratic president. Further, is was said, “If any white Democrat had pushed through a billion-dollar stimulus plan and a takeover of the health care, industry, he would have been equally detested by conservatives and Republicans,” according to Whit Ayres, a GOP pollster and consultant as a way of dismissing the racist claims. NPR of May 13, 2014 says, “Or perhaps its race and a combination of other things. His ideology, his background, his manner and unforgettable fact of his race-bleed together, making him a figure held in a type of disdain that’s notable even in an era of heavily polarized politics.” Robert Smith says in the same article. “Obama’s race and his Ivy League background and the sense of his elitism, all of those come together to make his case the worse we’ve seen.”
But President Obama had to put up with indignities like no other president from his opponents like what was said on CNN of July 1, 2016, “White public figures called him “boy,” a “food-stamp president,” an “animal” and a “tar baby.” One governor wagged her finger in his face…There were posters of Obama dressed as an African witch doctor, online images of First Lady Michelle Obama depicted as a monkey and racist Facebook comments by white people.
“The President was even forced to “show his papers” — release his original long-form birth certificate — after “birthers” led by Trump questioned whether he was born in the United States Trump’s demands that Obama prove his citizenship evoked the slave era when freed blacks were often forced to show their “certificate of freedom” to justify moving freely in public.
“Others cited political norms that were violated under Obama. They said no president had been refused a hearing or vote for his Supreme Court nominee since 1875; had a request to address a joint session of Congress rejected by the Speaker of the House; or had senators go behind his back to attempt to scuttle his negotiations with another country.” Then there was the time he was called a “liar” by a member of Congress while addressing a joint session.”
It was so bad that African-American people were somewhat overcome. Some said that it made them see that America was even more racist that they thought. They claimed with the coming of the 2016 election to be happy Obama’s term in office would be over, figuring that it would take the momentum out of the white supremacy rhetoric. But they didn’t count on the rise of Donald Trump, his populist message and ties of Breitbart, an Alt-Right blog, spewing of all kinds of racism that has spiked since the arrival of Donald Trump on the presidential scene, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) of February 15, 2017.
In fairness, spewing hate at presidents goes back in our history. There was Andrew Jackson and his wife back in the 19th century. In more recent times the Republicans reviled President Franklin D. Roosevelt, really just for being the first president to bring about legislation that would help the struggles of the poor and middle-class in our country. They heaped ugly personal attacks on him, saying that his paralysis was caused by syphilis, that he was a traitor to his class, that his wife was a lesbian (which could have been true), that he knew about the imminent attack on Pearl Harbor and did nothing to stop it, and the most unkind accusation was that he was Jewish. But this all seems pale compared to what was thrown at the Obamas.
After a while the attacks on the ACA just seemed like a vendetta that the Republicans couldn’t let go of. Despite their opposition, largely based on ACA derision, President Obama still won reelection. But now having a Republican-led Congress, the House had the temerity to pass bills to repeal the ACA 60 times, which never got to the president. If they had gotten to him, they knew the bllis would have been vetoed. What a waste of time for Congress. This was in addition to two rebuffs by the Supreme Court on attacks on the ACA as illegal.
Republicans’ July, 2017 attempts to enact a ”repeal and replace” were a dismal failure simply because their bill wasn’t any good and the American people let their lawmakers know it. No one could come up with a single reason that made it better then the ACA except it wouldn’t be mandatory. (That carried with it the seed of destruction since it would send the rates sky high as young, healthy adults would be more likely to avoid joining up until they got sick.) So three Republican Senators, John McCain of Arizona, Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Markowski of Alaska and all the Democrats, voted against the bill to repeal and replace the ACA bill in the Senate, after it narrowly passed the House. Like a phoenix arising from its ashes the Republican bill came up against in September of 2017 but Senator McConnell pulled it because he still didn’t have the votes and knew it. The reason for this is obvious. The ACA works. There are things wrong with it, but by and large it is a good thing for our country and citizens recognize this.
But the Republican leadership seemed stuck in this quagmire, unwilling to give it up since they had been promising to repeal the ACA for seven years to their hardliners. They had difficulty in fathoming that the Act had become increasingly popular and the majority of voters didn’t want to let it go any more.
There is a way out of this dilemma for Republicans. Instead of another failure to come up with their own version, the Republicans should just try to improve the ACA, and get credit for affecting a bi-partisan compromise. After all their recent attempts have only helped heighten the awareness of how good the ACA has been for our country. A compromise accommodation is the only way the Republicans can avoid having the ACA as a noose around their necks in the 2018 and 2020 elections.
Whether the Republicans’ antipathy to the ACA was racially motivated as an attack on President Obama remains a matter for conjecture. To give them the benefit of the doubt, it might also help dispel the notion if they would cooperate on a bipartisan attempt to improve it, and throw in the towel on “repeal and replace.”
