Hey rubes! Considering that the only people who thought that Obama could walk on water in the first place was the MSM, the Economist tacitly flashes back to their naïveté. Which would be charming, if its end result hadn’t been so destructive to the country.
Back in April of 2009, then-Newsweek (remember them?) editor Jon Meacham told an audience at the Reagan Library (and oh what a painful a place that must have been for Meacham to visit), “As a journalist, I did not drink the Obama Kool-Aid last year. I think if he walks across the Potomac, his feet will get wet.”
As Kathy Shaidle pointed out at the time, So what you’re saying is: he CAN walk on water…?
(And as late as June of 2009, another Newsweek editor, Evan Thomas, was still saying that Obama is “Sort of God.”)
Well, the president may not be fully submerged in the media’s opinion just yet, but he’s taken on considerably more water in the Economist’s eyes. But then, as Mark Steyn noted in May of 2009:
This is the point: The nuancey boys were wrong on Obama, and the knuckledragging morons were right. There is no post-partisan centrist “grappling” with the economy, only a transformative radical willing to make Americans poorer in the cause of massive government expansion. At some point, The Economist, Messrs Brooks, Buckley & Co are going to have to acknowledge this. If they’re planning on spending the rest of his term tutting that his management style is obstructing the effective implementation of his centrist agenda, it’s going to be a long four years.
And how about this?
In an accomplished press conference this week, Mr Obama reminded the world what an impressive politician he can be. He has a capacity to inspire that is unmatched abroad or at home.
Oh, dear. That’s so January 20th it makes these toffee-nosed Brits sound like straw-sucking hayseeds.
Meanwhile, National Journal, another establishment left publication, is finally starting to notice that Obamacare “spreads the wealth around,” as the president would say:
Four years later, as the program that all sides now dub “Obamacare” stumbles through its tortuous implementation, the furor over the rollout of the federal online insurance exchange has obscured a larger, more fundamental truth: If the program was going to fulfill all that Obama pledged, not everyone was going to come out ahead—someone was going to have to pay the freight. Some subgroups of Americans were going to be worse off than they were before.
Obama didn’t say that in July 2009—or any time while the program was being debated in Congress. He couldn’t. He couldn’t stand up before the American public and say that the only way to achieve the program’s goals was to reallocate money within the health insurance market. That there would need to be a transfer of wealth—from the young to the old, from men to women, from the healthy to the sick. That to raise the floor, you had to lower the ceiling. To do so would have handed his enemies the kind of weaponry they craved, validation that Obama was indeed some sort of “socialist” who believed in “redistribution.” It could have killed the effort in its tracks, then and there, making the tea-party eruption in town halls across the country in the month that followed look like a Kiwanis meeting.
And had the federal insurance exchange launched this fall with a minimum of fuss, it’s possible the sausage-making machinery of Obamacare might have been obscured. If some of the millions of consumers who had received cancellation notices from their insurers in the past few weeks were able to jump on the Web, select a new plan, and ensure continuity of care, it might have alleviated some of the political damage to the administration, even if those consumers were forced to pay more for their new plans.
But that hasn’t happened. Instead, the exchange website’s woes sparked a media feeding frenzy that filled the airwaves with middle-class citizens relating heartrending tales of canceled policies and rate hikes, adding to the perception, fair or not, that the entire program is in deep jeopardy, or at the very least is some sort of scheme that will either collapse or soak consumers and taxpayers alike. The curtain has been yanked back to expose the ungainly reality that lies at the very heart of the program: Very simply, under the Affordable Care Act, there are winners and there are losers. And there were always going to be. That fact, even more than the star-crossed rollout, may be the more enduring political threat to Obamacare.
Hey, remember when the media decided that man who inadvertently caused Obama to blurt out that he was a wealth redistributionist should be destroyed simply for asking a presidential candidate a question that the MSM deemed too impertinent to even bring up? Good times, good times — right, MSM?
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For the MSM, it was — and still is — better to feign cluelessness than to ask a question that might cause the Won to reveal his worldview. Just ask Tom Brokaw.
Incidentally, as I wrote in June of this year, you can a pretty good sense of the arc of the left’s Obama worship by checking the various Economist covers from 2008 through the present:
Economist Obama covers through the years. Click to enlarge.
“The outlier is the image of a punch-drunk and bandaged Obama after the bruising fight to pass ObamaCare in 2010; but note that the Economist was firmly back in the tank by 2011. Nice touch having Michele Bachmann waving at the president while brandishing a sniper rifle; take two Krugmans out of petty cash, boys,” I added back then.
Update: “He wasn’t walking on water. He was walking on your shoulders. Now you’re all drowning.”
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