The comparison used by Barbara Tuchman in The March Of Folly is apt. The present leadership has failed to realize that by persisting in pushing an agenda that is not just unpopular but deeply unpopular is folly.
"Their blind persistence in the face of reality threatens to turn this political march of folly into an electoral rout in November. In the wake of the stinging loss in Massachusetts, there was a moment when the president and the Democratic leadership seemed to realize the reality of the health-care situation. Yet like some seductive siren of Greek mythology, the lure of health-care reform has arisen again."They present the case that the battle for public opinion has not just been lost, but has been irretrievably lost to the extent that a significant majority of the voting public is strongly opposed to ANY of the proposals by a 4 to 1 margin to those who strongly support it.
"...a solid majority of Americans opposes the massive health-reform plan. Four-fifths of those who oppose the plan strongly oppose it, according to Rasmussen polling this week, while only half of those who support the plan do so strongly. Many more Americans believe the legislation will worsen their health care, cost them more personally and add significantly to the national deficit. Never in our experience as pollsters can we recall such self-deluding misconstruction of survey data."The present leadership of the Democratic Party, Obama, Pelosi and Reid, are not just leading their party into a hole, but jumping off the cliff into disaster that will take, if not decades to recover from, at least several elections cycles (6-8).
"The notion that once enactment is forced, the public will suddenly embrace health-care reform could not be further from the truth -- and is likely to become a rallying cry for disaffected Republicans and independents... "But don't just take Rasmussen's polls,
"...the country is moving away from big government, with distrust growing more generally toward the role of government in our lives. Scott Rasmussen asked last month whose decisions people feared more in health care: that of the federal government or of insurance companies. By 51 percent to 39 percent, respondents feared the decisions of federal government more."If you keep in mind that traditionally, people loathe their health insurance companies, that number is literally earth shattering in its shift of public perception.
CNN's polls that have traditionally used and oversampling of Democrats are showing some alarming trends. CNN found that
"56 percent of Americans believe that the government has become so powerful it constitutes an immediate threat to the freedom and rights of citizens. When only 21 percent of Americans say that Washington operates with the consent of the governed..."This has become a crisis of confidence in the ability of the government to do the bidding of the populace at large.
The conclusion they have reached...along with much of the country outside of the Washington Beltway is, "Unless the Democrats fundamentally change their approach, they will produce not just a march of folly but also run the risk of unmitigated disaster in November. "
I have been saying this for months. I strongly suspect that if this bill is passed...and passed through the very shady reconcilliation process, that the 256 seats in the House of Representatives that the Democratic party held at the beginning of last year will shrink by at as many as 100 seats. The Senate will see the loss of 16 of the 17 seats they now hold (only Chuck Schumer, D NY will remain). The election losses of last Novemeber and January should have been a wake up call, but the present leadership of the Democratic Party has refused to heed that call...
UPDATE: Similar sentiments are being expressed by Shikha Damia of Forbes magazine.
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