Health-care reform: Can it be repealed?

“Resistance is not futile,” said Phil Gramm in The Wall Street Journal. Just as soon as President Obama signed the “hodgepodge of schemes” he calls health-care reform last week, Democrats began insisting that any Republican campaign to repeal it would be futile. That simply isn’t true. Democrats may have been able to “override public opinion” for now, but public disgust will only grow when its full implications become clear. When the public sees health-care costs and premiums continuing to soar, and the government stepping in to impose rationing, it will rebel—and demand repeal. And lest we forget, “there will be two congressional elections and a presidential election before the government takeover is implemented in 2014.” It’s already clear the American people are not “going to roll over and play dead,” said Investor’s Business Daily in an editorial. According to a new CBS poll, 62 percent of Americans want Republicans to keep fighting, while a Rasmussen poll found that 55 percent favor repeal.

“Talk about sore losers,” said Clarence Page in the Chicago Tribune. It was chilling enough when Tea Party protesters hurled racist and anti-gay epithets at Democratic lawmakers. Now somebody has left a coffin on the lawn of Missouri Rep. Russ Carnahan, windows were smashed at the district offices of two other congressmen, and vandals damaged Democratic offices in Wichita, Cincinnati, and Rochester, N.Y. Congressmen of both parties are getting death threats and vicious phone calls. Are people really that angry about “a health-care safety net for the uninsured?” Republican leaders must take a large part of the blame, said Paul Krugman in The New York Times. They’ve been whipping their base into a frenzy, warning that Obama has “totalitarian ambitions”—and that health-care reform is the first step to a government takeover of everything. When House Republican Leader John Boehner calls the passage of health reform “Armageddon” and Sarah Palin produces a map “putting Democratic lawmakers in the cross hairs of a rifle sight,” they’ve crossed the line into something ugly—and dangerous.

The rage isn’t really about health care, anyway, said Frank Rich, also in the Times. Health-care reform “delivers 32 million newly insured Americans to private insurers”— hardly a government takeover—and it includes many features, such as the individual mandate to buy insurance, that Mitt Romney and other Republicans have supported in the past. So why the “tsunami of anger”? Think back to last year’s presidential campaign, when GOP rallies drew livid white right-wingers screaming “traitor” and “off with his head” at every mention of Barack Obama’s name. The election of a black president has triggered a wave of fear and resentment among a “dwindling and threatened minority”—hence, the Tea Party. Tea Partiers, who are nearly all white, hate health reform because it was spearheaded by Obama, a female speaker of the House from San Francisco (Nancy Pelosi), and openly gay committee chairman Rep. Barney Frank. To the Right, reform is a “handy excuse” to rail about “an inexorable and immutable change in the identity of America.”

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Oh, please, said Michael Graham in the Boston Herald. That racism smear “has been the media meme on the Tea Party movement from the beginning,” and it is designed to marginalize an authentic grass-roots uprising against Big Government. “The more time Obamacare defenders spend shouting ‘bigot,’ the less time they have to spend trying to explain the unworkable math of their bureaucratic boondoggle.” Democrats peddle these nasty generalizations at their own peril, said David Paul Kuhn in RealClearPolitics.com. Since Obama assumed office, his approval rating among whites has fallen 24 points. “How these whites see Obama has changed. Obama’s race has not.” The more liberals simply presume that white opposition to Obama is racist, “the more whites stop listening to liberals.”

But Republicans, too, risk a backlash, said Stuart Rothenberg in Roll Call. When the November midterm elections roll around, it’s safe to assume that most people who strongly opposed the Democratic health-care overhaul will vote Republican. The Republican base is secure. For the big swing vote of independents, though, the real issue will be jobs and the economy. If Republicans keep railing about a health-care battle they’ve already lost, they will “look like a bunch of spoiled children who didn’t get their way, rather than adults focused on fixing a problem.” By November, most voters will be looking for solutions and leadership—not “sour grapes” and revenge.