Close Enough for Government Work

Matt Welch gives us a few too many facts about the differences between President Obama's words and reality.  Read the whole thing.  How can we POSSIBLY believe now that all Mr. Obama and Ms. Pelosi would have to do to convince us that the Democrats' health care plan is great would be to explain the bill better.  The Democratic leadership in Congress helped set the President up for the big fall in his approval ratings:

Take the issue he has explained more than any other: health care. In the State of the Union address, Obama claimed that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) had estimated that “our approach” to health care reform “would bring down the deficit by as much as $1 trillion over the next two decades.” This is, strictly speaking, not true. The Democrats’ “approach” to health care reform includes a permanent change to the Medicare reimbursement rates for doctors, colloquially known as the “doc fix.” The CBO estimated that the doc fix, when combined with the health care reform legislative package, actually “would increase the budget deficit in 2019 by $23 billion relative to current law, an increment that would grow in subsequent years.” This is why House Democrats stripped out the doc fix from the health care bill, and passed it separately; it made the CBO scores look bad, making it harder for the president to present bogus claims about deficit neutrality.

That bit of mendacity only scratches the surface of how Congress and the administration gamed the system to produce nice-looking numbers. The CBO, by its own rules, has to take Congress at its word when a piece of legislation promises unspecified future “cuts” in spending, even though an overwhelming majority of promised future cuts never come to pass (a fact that the CBO itself has repeatedly warned in supplementary comments). The Senate promised more than $300 billion in such cuts. Furthermore, the CBO scores bills in 10-year windows. So the Senate delayed more than 99 percent of the reform package’s spending until 2014, thus allowing the decade of 2010–2019 to clock in under the magic $1 trillion number. Add to all that chicanery the fact that every major health care entitlement expansion in U.S. history has vastly exceeded initial cost projections, and you have ample reasons for why Americans believed, by a margin of more than 3 to 1, that health care reform would exacerbate rather than improve the deficit.

Glenn Reynolds:

It’s funny — all he had to do to be a success was to live up to the kind of Presidency he promised. But he didn’t, and it appears that he couldn’t. 

Reader comment:

The best example of this is health insurance mandates. The President defeated Hillary Clinton for the nomination of his party by telling Americans that it was wrong to require people to purchase insurance. Now, as President, he is trying to force people to purchase health insurance. And threatening IRS audits and fines. And he claims to not understand the opposition to this proposal.

Welch again:

(Bill) Clinton’s reptilian relationship with the truth, suffused as it always has been with a catch-me-if-you-can sense of personal preservation, actually turned out to have some uses for the nation when he changed course after the 1994 Republican revolution and began co-opting some of the limited-government policies proposed by his opponents. It’s easier for a chameleon to change his spots.

Obama’s dishonesty, by contrast, seems to spring from a different place. As a man who has spent most of his career wowing people with his words and very little of it converting those words into deeds, he has an activist’s gap between rhetoric and reality and a radio broadcaster’s promiscuous carelessness with cutting rhetorical corners. . . .

But there’s a less charitable explanation too. . .

I wonder how close the experience of being President is to Mr. Obama's expectations? He's started talking about how he'd rather be a great one-term President than a mediocre two-term President. Like Stephen Green says, Being President is hard.