President Obama sells aesthetics, he sells the paint job not the car, the icing, not the cake; he’s been omnipresent and relentless on healthcare and it’s not working.
It seems to me that Obama wasn’t elected because he was smart, though I suspect he is, certainly not because he had an abundance of experience or that he had done anything; he was elected because we wanted to feel good. The country wanted to feel good about having a charming, handsome and articulate young president. We had no expectation that he would actually do anything, that’s wasn’t the point. Electing Obama wasn’t about change, it was about aesthetics. We just wanted to feel good about ourselves and for that, Obama was perfect. You can see it in that Obama has been on the cover of Time magazine about 15 times over the past two years and the media loves him. They love him because he sells, and this, in the end, is the point and product of Obama, nothing more is expected or wanted. He sells “feel good.”
The challenge is that no one told the Democratic Party in general and the congress in particular; they went for the head fake, and now they can’t get back into playing position. Like that awkward moment that happens after you compliment someone and they think you want to take them out on a date. The democrats have grossly over read the signs, and now we have to tell them that there will be no wedding.
Democrats are blind to these subtleties because aesthetics is all they do, they are all about what looks and feel good, hence they could not see it coming. In the democratic world, there are no trade-offs, no balance sheets, no sense that activities have costs and that words have meaning. They are all about the look and feel of what they want to do with no interest in the quality of actual outcomes, hence when the democrats started talking about fixing healthcare, people got scared and rightly so.
In the matter of one’s healthcare, outcomes really matter. If your doctor tells you your cancer is cured, you want to know that those words have meaning and that they are true. You can get away with misrepresenting paying for illegal aliens’ healthcare in a speech, but misrepresenting a diagnosis to another human being is unacceptable. If you have to undergo a surgical procedure, you actually want to know that the person doing the surgery has experience and knows what they’re doing. The looks of the physician and the quality of their speech is far less important than their knowledge and skill in doing the work. In healthcare, we’re all conservative because we live with the results, no one else can do that for us.
Healthcare clarified the divide and the purpose of the Obama administration. They are there to provide political counter point in deal making and sell copy (period). As long as Obama stays in his lane, he’ll get along fine, he has already demonstrated the weakness of his experience and that he cannot be trusted to do anything more.
