Michael Barone‘s latest column for the Washington Examiner explores a key challenge for the party of big government.
There is a larger problem here not just for [Hillary] Clinton but for her party. Since the 1930s it has been dedicated to the proposition that expanding government will help ordinary citizens make their way through the perils of (then) an industrial-age and (now) an information-age society.
The problem is that the seven years of the Obama administration, quite contrary to the president’s intention, has discredited government as an instrumentality to improve people’s lives.
The most glaring failure has been Obamacare, from the implosion of the healthcare.gov website to the recent announcement of the nation’s largest health insurer that it would no longer offer policies on Obamacare’s exchanges.
Designing government policies that produce positive results without negative unanticipated consequences is a tricky business. Social Security required government to collect taxes and send out checks on time — something a competent bureaucracy can do. Obamacare requires government to do many more things, some of which government is not very good at. Voters have noticed.
They have noticed as well that government is no longer very good at doing things almost everyone thinks it should do, like providing health care for military veterans. Democrats can argue that the VA hospital system’s problems antedate 2008. But government is their baby, and they’ve been in charge for seven years.
