Thursday, October 01, 2009

OP ED: Obama’s Playing His Cards Wrong: Why the President’s Health Care Speech Failed to Persuade

Obama’s Playing His Cards Wrong

Why the President’s Health Care Speech Failed to Persuade

By Matt Mackowiak

September 11, 2009

New York Daily News

In politics, unlike in spades, you can only play your trump card once.

On Wednesday night, with all three networks and the cable channels offering free air time for an audience of millions, President Obama played the ace up his sleeve in an attempt to save his health care legislation, sway weak-kneed legislators and convince some of the many Americans that oppose his health care plan.

The speech was well-delivered and included several effective devices. The President made a pitch to centrists and Blue Dog Democrats by tying health care to the federal deficit. He offered some red meat to Republicans in advancing a pilot program to study the need for medical malpractice reform. He played to key Senate Republicans Orrin Hatch, John McCain and Charles Grassley by reminding them that they each had passed important legislation by working with the late Sen. Ted Kennedy in the past. And he tugged at the heartstrings of everyone when he read a letter from the posthumous senator, his voice echoing from the grave.

However, while the speech may have excelled in English, it failed in math.

The President’s health care plan faced two huge hurdles on Wednesday night.

First, Americans simply do not believe you can cover everyone, improve care and decrease cost. There is no such thing as a free lunch, especially not for 30 million to 47 million people. Americans do not believe that a plan that will cost $900 billion over the first decade will not end up costing more and will meet the requirement that it be deficit neutral. With record deficits and skyrocketing debt, the American people are not willing to bet that the federal government will keep its word when it comes to spending.

The second hurdle is corralling the votes. On this issue, only two numbers matter: 218 and 60. Obama needs at least 218 votes in the House to pass his bill. However, 60 liberal Democrats have already said they will not vote for a bill without the public option in it. That’s enough, with the Republicans, to block legislation in the House.

It will take 60 votes to pass the kind of sweeping health care bill Obama envisions in the Senate. While Democrats threaten to use a parliamentary procedure known as budget reconciliation to pass a bill with only 51 votes, such a move would dramatically limit the reach of the bill to only include revenue raisers and spending cuts, not insurance reform provisions. To date, only 43 or 44 Senate Democrats support the public option, out of the 59 members of the caucus. It’s possible that a deal can be hammered out in a conference committee, but someone will have to blink and both sides are dug in.

While the public option may be only a part of the health care reform proposal, it has come to symbolize the entire effort. Many Americans see it as the first step to a single payer system, amounting to a government takeover of health care. They believe that a government-backed public option, even if imposed through a trigger, could completely dismantle the private insurance system as we know it.

It is clear that you cannot have fair competition in health care between a government plan and the private insurers when the government is both the referee and a participant.

The central challenge facing the President was to use English to affect the math - and it’s unlikely that he achieved that end with this speech.

After the speech, Bruce Josten, executive vice president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce said, “By the President’s own standards of not increasing the deficit, and based on the three points he laid out - reducing health care costs, covering the uninsured, and making insurance more stable for those who have it, not one of the bills currently being debated would meet the President’s own standards.”

In the end, the strategic question, raised by Mara Liasson of NPR, is how many liberal Democrats will lose their seats if they vote for a bill without the public option? That number pales in comparison to the Blue Dogs who will pay a political price for voting for a bill with the public option in it.

On both the public option and the plan more broadly, the question now becomes: Can Obama effectively sway key lawmakers in small, private discussions on the phone or in the White House?

Through his speech making, the President has proven he can be like JFK. Now, through his arm-twisting, can he make like LBJ?

Mackowiak is an Austin and Washington, D.C.-based GOP political and communications consultant and founder of Potomac Strategy Group, LLC, and was press secretary to two U.S. senators from 2005-2009.