'Progressivism is Politics by Cramdown'

In the Wall Street Journal, Daniel Henninger writes, “American progressivism is politics by cramdown:”

Ask Jamie Dimon. Ask the coal miners the EPA is putting out of business. Ask the union workers waiting for jobs on the Keystone XL pipeline. Ask Boeing in South Carolina or the harmless tea party groups from towns no one has ever heard of that were shut down by the IRS, or the 20,000 inner-city parents and students who marched across the Brooklyn Bridge to protest obliteration of their charter schools by New York’s progressive mayoral candidate, Bill de Blasio.

Up to now, most of the events of the Obama presidency have passed in and out of the news as just politics. But with ObamaCare and its details touching so many people all at once, it has become impossible not to recognize that the Affordable Care Act is an offensive ideological exercise, not merely an entitlement program. By Mr. Obama’s own admission, this law is the way he wants the world to work in the U.S.—whether in health, education, energy, infrastructure or finance. And what Americans now riding through the ObamaCare hurricane of canceled policies, disappearing doctors and rebooted promises have to be asking themselves is: Do I want to live with this level of personal enforcement in the U.S.?

Perhaps the better question is, will the political class help them understand what ObamaCare is, or wanted to be? Most Republican politicians aren’t particularly comfortable doing ideology. But the left revels in it. Mr. Obama bellows it in every speech. And absent someone shouting that the progressive emperor suddenly isn’t wearing any clothes, they will win with it again.

Barack Obama may have spent a lifetime failing up, but eventually it’s just failure. He has presided over five years of sickly economic growth, inadequate job creation, a doubling of the food stamp population and now this—ObamaCare.

And the progressive cramdown requires plenty of lying along the way, to grease the skids — including the one that is ultimately driven into the voter’s wallet and derriere:

“Obama ‘was sort of overlearning the lessons of Hillary Clinton’s time on health care. What destroyed Hillary Clinton’s plan was that people became convinced they were going to lose their health care,’ said Elaine Kamarck, who was a White House aide at the time and now heads the Brookings Institution’s Center for Effective Public Management.

“‘The one lesson that was learned about messaging was that you had to guarantee people that nothing will change,’ she said.”

Young Ezra Klein of the Washington Post knew that as early as 2008; keep this clip in mind when reading his take on ObamaCare today, and the spin on Obamacare’s current round of disasters that’s currently being coordinated via Klein and his Journolist:

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And it’s only going to get worse for Americans:

Obama Officials In 2010: 93 Million Americans Will Be Unable To Keep Their Health Plans Under Obamacare: http://t.co/kXdEkCBz38 @Forbes

— Avik Roy (@avik) October 31, 2013