…until the Obamacare marketplaces are scheduled to open for enrollment.
Back in college, I read a book entitled The Presidential Character: Predicting Performance in the White House. Author James David Barber examines past presidencies and analyzes the decision-making of presidents based upon their world view, character, and style.
“Character” comes from the Greek word for engraving; in one sense it is what life has marked into a man’s being. As used here, character is the way the president orients himself toward life – not for the moment, but enduringly.
Furthermore, Barber explains the four types of presidential character: active-positive, active-negative, passive-positive, and passive-negative.
Through my eyes, it seems quite clear that President Obama conveys himself as an active-negative president – he stands by his ultimate legislative priority, Obamacare, to a point where his sweeping health reform becomes his own personal problem. He seeks unlimited authority. He does not heed to any constructive criticism from Congress or the public. His health care train barrels down the tracks full steam ahead into Max Baucus’s predicted “wreck”. No brakes for approaching the law’s already problematic issues and power grabs. (i.e.: rising insurance premiums, fiscal irresponsibility, and the illegal distribution of exchange subsidies in federally-facilitated marketplaces.)
While Republicans in Congress have voted 40 times on a bill that delays or repeals portions of Obamacare, both sides of the political aisle have voted on two bills – one that gives the president authority to delay the already unilaterally delayed employer mandate and a bill that delays the individual mandate.
Terry Eastland of the Weekly Standard writes on the employer mandate:
Willing to grant the administration the authority to delay the mandate by one year, Republicans wrote legislation to that end that was introduced by Rep. Tim Griffin of Arkansas—the plainly named Authority for Mandate Delay Act. Having control of the House, Republicans passed the bill with only one of their members voting against it and some 35 Democrats voting in the affirmative.
Instead of praising the House for its action and asking the Senate to approve the measure, the administration stuck to its position, announced in a veto threat prior to the House vote, that the authority-granting legislation was “unnecessary.”
Even Democrats are now at odds with the president’s actions regarding the rollout of Obamacare. Michael Cannon, health policy expert at the Cato Institute notes:
22 Democrats voted to delay its “individual mandate” for one year. Obamacare opponents now have an opportunity to widen the fissures among its supporters.
Opposition from supporters doesn’t stop there. Unions are also enraged. Employers can now avoid the federal health law’s employer mandate penalties by cutting workers’ hours to part-time, strip them of their generous health benefits, and dump them onto the taxpayer funded marketplaces that are scheduled to open this fall in a state near you.
But to president Obama, none of this matters. Instead, he attempts to mask these problems with press conferences that promote minimal results of the federal health law.
