I guess this was inevitable. The web site doesn't work, contrary to what he promised. People's premiums are soaring, contrary to what he promised. The vaunted (and desperately needed) young healthies are not signing up, contrary to what he projected. People's existing plans are being cancelled, contrary to what he assured everyone. And the health insurance industry, which thought it was getting a sweetheart deal by supporting a law that would mandate people buy its services, is looking at an existential crisis.
What do you do about all this? Campaign!
It's what Obama does. He does not govern. He doesn't even really know what that means. He thinks governing is merely the making of pronouncements, followed by the passive role of letting your people work out the details. And when the details can't be worked out because the pronouncement made no sense in the first place? You hit the trail, big guy. And you enlist 200,000 of your closest friends to come along:
President Barack Obama wearily pleaded late Monday with supporters of his " Organizing for Action" (OFA) group to fight for him through " one more campaign" -- his legacy-defining drive to save Obamacare.
" I've run my last political campaign, but I've got one more campaign in me, and that's making sure that this law works," Obama said on a conference call organized by OFA. " And we're not backing off one bit."
Obama complained that " a lot of misinformation" about the Affordable Care Act has been " created and fed" by the failure of the federal HealthCare.gov portal for buying health insurance. He did not offer specifics.
The president spoke for about 14 minutes -- sounding utterly bone-tired but plainly trying to recapture the magic of his 2008 campaign or at least the competence of his 2012 reelection push.
" I'm going to need your help, your energy, your faith, your ability to reach out to neighbors," he said. " You're going to make the difference."
So he's going to be "making sure that this law works" by campaigning? And a bunch of OFA automatons are going to "make the difference" by reaching out to their neighbors? This is going to make the web site work? This is going to make the risk pool work? This is going to cure the sticker shock people experience as they discover the new "approved" ObamaCare plans cost four times as much as the old ones that they liked just fine?
This all makes sense, of course. Obama may be "utterly bone tired" but we all know he can campaign in his sleep. It's what he does. It's all he does. You can't make your policy work but you can get out there and talk about Big Bird and binders full of women.
What he wasn't prepared to deal with, however, is that his one big legislative success actually set up a seminal moment in the history of liberalism. The dream of liberals is to have everyone rely on the government for what they need. They can make that sound fantastic when they stand around talking about it. But when they manage to pass it into law and they have to do it, people find out in real life terms what the experience of relying on the government is actually like.
Maybe that's why, as Clark reported this morning, a majority of Americans now believes it's not the federal government's responsibility to ensure everyone has health care. People can back that notion in theory, but when it's really tried and people find out it doesn't actually work, the notion tanks in the polls.
So Obama thinks the solution is another campaign. Problem: When Obama was the product, he could convince people that he fit whatever their personal notions were of what a president should be. The objective of this campaign will be to make people love their cancelled insurance, their soaring premiums, their 404 error messages. Obama's not that good a campaigner, but I guess when you're bone tired and have no idea how to actually fix your disastrous health care law, you revert to what you know.
