Why won’t people admit it’s self-inflicted?
And after writing the subtitle, I wonder if I need to say more?
Start with Paul Ryan. Over the past seven years, Ryan spent cumulative man-centuries of government time repealing Obamacare. He swore he had a replacement plan, and now we know he lied. Ryan showed he was just a hollow phony.
Trump strutted his ‘something much better’ line across the country, but again, he had nothing more than those words. No surprise there, of course.
Ryan didn’t even know how to write a replacement plan. The press paints him as the Republican brain, for some reason, but again, this was both clueless and tone-deaf. I mean, come on! The government wrote Obamacare, so there’s a pretty decent template for how to write something similar. It ain’t a 17-day wonder.
And Ryan didn’t know how to sell it. That’s supposed to be his day job, right? Ryan was surprised that a terrible bill with no constituency outside the super-rich plan and few obvious sweeteners didn’t sail through. Why am I really supposed to pretend Ryan is an accomplished legislator? Has he accomplished some other big legislative victory I should know about?
Trump isn’t worth repeating, but really. “Who knew it would be complicated?” And any of his purported ability to negotiate was MIA.
So, here’s my postmortem, in descending order:
- They had no ideas for a replacement for the ACA. That’s probably because it is the Republican plan. (The Democratic plan was something single-payer, either like Medicare or Medicare itself. Remember?) I have no reason to pretend the primary cause of death was that it was a terrible idea.
- Republicans mismanaged the development. No idea why they so badly underestimated the effort it really requires. This is one sixth of the American economy, for god’s sake! Primary a Ryan thing, although McConnell and the entire Senate is curiously MIA. Odd that the Press isn’t questioning it.
- Trump is his own singular pool of devastation. Some people have green thumbs? He has a brown thumb, turning anything energetic and green into… something less energetic and much less green.
There are other reasons, but those are the top three.
