ObamaCare didn't fail because it's timid

Let’s stop for a moment and ponder that. It’s common to hear Democratic pundits lament that centrist senators like Ben Nelson and Joe Lieberman held the bill hostage, forcing it to be underpowered to the task and leading to the failures of today. But if Massachusetts balked at signing up for this, then the problem wasn’t just with a few squishy moderates. Had Democrats pushed for a $2 trillion bill with a much larger mandate, as Drum wishes, the issue wouldn’t have been a handful of DINO senators — it would have been the folks from deep-blue states fleeing for cover ahead of a mob of angry constituents.

As it was, thanks to the inconvenient arrival of Republican Scott Brown to replace Ted Kennedy, Democrats were forced to use a parliamentary maneuver called reconciliation to pass major parts of the program. Reconciliation bills cannot increase the deficit outside of the 10-year forecast window, so even if Democrats had been willing to hold hands and commit an even more gruesome form of collective political suicide than the one they chose, they could not have done what Kevin describes.

So there we are: This counterfactual history could not have happened, which is why it didn’t. But it’s particularly worth discussing why the bill was so unpopular. There was a pundit parlor game around the time of passage, and for a few years after, where liberal pundits would look at how individual components of the law polled, and report that Obamacare was secretly popular because its provisions polled well except for two little items — the funding mechanisms, and the mandate. This is, of course, exactly backwards. Those polls weren’t telling Democrats that people actually liked Obamacare; they were telling Democrats that people hated the taxes and the mandate so much that it outweighed everything they liked about the bill. Had the taxes and the mandate been higher, that hatred would have been more intense.