WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: ObamaCare Debacle Could Kill Big Blue:

Sounding like some kind of Fox News contributor, the left-leaning Edsall goes on to point out that the Obamacare dream ignores some basic realities about the way the world and the government work. Democrats pitched the Affordable Care Act as a law that would let the haves keep their doctors and their plans while giving more care to the have-nots, meanwhile offering Amazon levels of service to all comers through a magical website. Now that the quest for that kind of system is looking more like a misguided unicorn hunt, Edsall suddenly, horribly, begins to see just how foolish and utopian the whole project was . . . But as critical as these words seem, Edsall remains a loyal son of the left even as he mourns what he fears may be the greatest liberal failure since the Vietnam War. He blames the Obamacare debacle on the selfishness of middle class American whites— nasty, unenlightened racists that they are—who want to hog all the health care for themselves rather than share equitably with people of color. . . .

Here Edsall is simultaneously overestimating the policy sophistication of the white middle class and underestimating its morality. While it is true that, as Edsall points out, Obamacare is an aggressively redistributionist program that intends to shift hundreds of billions of dollars away from the middle class to the poor, I don’t think many voters have done the math on this. They are not reacting to the $455 billion in Medicare cuts that help to feed the Obamacare beast because not many people really understand how the new system is supposed to work. And at the same time, unlikely as it may sound to the finely tuned consciences of the New York Times editorial page, there are scores of millions of middle class white Americans who don’t hate minorities and would actually like to see things go better for them.

Edsall is not the only one who doubts the goodwill of many middle class whites. Over at the proudly port-listing Plumline blog at the Washington Post, Greg Sargent hammers the theme that America hates Obamacare because America hates poor blacks.

It’s a dumb and desperate argument, but what else have they got? And it flatters the oikophobia of their core readership, such as it remains. Quoth Mead:

Middle America isn’t frothing over Obamacare because we are a nation of racist policy wonks who did the math and hate the blacks. The public is angry first (as Edsall mostly seems to understand) because of the supremely infuriating blend of incompetent arrogance our Second Lincoln has brought to the greatest domestic challenge of his presidency. They are angry because an expensive and cumbersome new piece of social engineering looks badly engineered. But in the second place, they are angry because the liberal wing of the Democratic Party and its journalistic spear carriers in the MSM systematically misrepresented the nature of the new system.

They lied about the plan then, they’re lying about the racism now. That’s who they are, that’s what they do.