Video: Americans have to “stop clinging” to their health care policies

Sound familiar?  It did to Verum Serum, too, and they put together this video segment tying Barack Obama’s remarks this month on health care to his nearly-fatal remarks about guns and religion during 2008 when he thought no one was recording him. According to Obama, the entire resistance to his idea of health-care reform is that Americans are bitterly clinging to that “broken system” that has approval ratings in the 80s — far above President Obama himself, especially these days:

John sums it up quite well:

You begin to get the idea that, underneath all his efforts to talk to people like adults, he thinks there are really just two camps: Courageous progressives, e.g. himself and people who agree with him, and backward bumpkins who huddle around failure because they’re too afraid to be more like…him.

It must be an empowering way to see the world. It’s also arrogant, elitist and false. But I wonder if any of that can compare to the psychic kick of seeing oneself as a superhero among benighted mortals.

Remember when Obama scoffed at the notion that he was an elitist during the campaign? I wrote at the time that Obama was deliberately confusing “elites” and “elitism”, and that having a sitting US Senator attempting to deny his elite status was a little odd anyway. This is a perfect display of elitism — someone telling people that they don’t know how to calculate their own self-interest and declaring that a few people in Washington can figure that out for them better than they can themselves. It’s patronizing, condescending, and in fact is the very kind of attitude that created the impulse for our separation from the paternalistic monarchy that refused to allow for the notion that the colonies should have a say in their own governance.

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