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4 • Saturday, October 12, 2013
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Voters: Both parties are making blunders What to make of all the polls on the government shutdown? You know, the ones that say that, to varying degrees, congressional Republicans are being blamed more than Democrats and Barack Obama. Michael Let me give a roundabout Barone answer, based on a theory that people sometimes try to Columnist send messages through their responses to poll questions. I developed this theory after watching British political polls since the 1960s. For the large majority of that time -- the major exception was the first eight years of Tony Blair’s prime ministership -- voters have given negative job ratings to the governments of the day. Yet during that time, incumbent parties have won most general elections. This is not necessarily a contradiction. Britons, with their two-and-a-half party system (the Liberal Democrats are the half), are adept tactical voters. If they live in a district where Lib Dems are stronger than Labor, then Laborites will vote Lib Dem to keep the Conservatives out. In responding to polls, British voters who fear the government may go too far will express disapproval as a way of checking the prime minister’s theoretically dictatorial, but in fact limited power. Backbenchers will pressure the PM not to go too far if his or her job approval is low. In our two-party system, Americans seldom vote tactically. But I think they sometimes respond to polls tactically. That helps explain why Bill Clinton’s job approval went up 20 points when the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke and Republicans threatened impeachment. That looks like a plea to Republicans to drop impeachment. Americans believe in the Twenty-Second Amendment, limiting the president to two terms. Clinton had been elected to a second term and was competently performing his day work. Let him serve that term out, voters seemed to be saying. So it may be helpful to look at government shutdown polls in a similar light. Many polls ask which side will be or is more to blame for the shutdown. Pluralities blame Barack Obama over Republicans -- 39-36 and 38-30 (Pew), 44-35 (CBS), 42-32 (Fox News). When asked whether Republicans or the Obama administration is more to blame, it’s Republicans, 39-36 (National Journal). A general rule in polling is that individuals are more popular than groups of people -- especially groups of politicians. That Obama has only a small lead, and the Obama administration a statistically insignificant deficit, does not signal great presidential strength. Acting like a responsible adult or a spoiled child? Spoiled child for Republicans in Congress, 69-25 (CNN/ORC). Responsible adult for Obama -- but only by a 49-47 margin. Clear majorities prefer that politicians compromise rather than stick to principle, majorities large enough that many people are not sticking to party lines on this. One can argue that the same voters who reelected a Democratic president and returned a Republican House are not entitled to complain when each refuses to give in. Each side is acting out of principled conviction. But one can also argue that each side has made blunders. House Republicans started by refusing to fund the government without defunding Obamacare -- a result Democrats surely would never permit and which large majorities in polls oppose. In response, Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid have flatly refused to negotiate. The administration has tried to block World War II veterans from visiting their open-air memorial. Elections are zero sum games: One side must win. Knock down the other guys sufficiently and you will. Partisan struggles like this are not: Both sides can lose ground, as happened after grand bargain negotiations collapsed in August 2011. The message I hear voters sending through poll responses is that both sides are not acting competently. They’re not doing their job. Members of Congress can survive politically even when voters think congressional leaders are incompetent. But perceptions of incompetence can weaken and cripple a president. (Michael Barone is senior political analyst for The Washington Examiner.)
Prayer for today Spirit of life, I pray that thou wilt continually live within me. May my days be spent neither in waste nor idleness, but planned to use, with the best that is given me. Amen.
A verse to share “They say unto him, Caesar’s. Then saith he unto them, render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s.” Matthew 22:21
Obamacare rollout is a train wreck Nancy Pelosi infamously said that we had to pass Obamacare to find out what’s in it. The thenHouse speaker erroneously assumed, evidently, that people would be able to get onto the government-run exchanges created by the law. So far the law’s implementation has been as ugly as its passage. The rollout of Obamacare has been so disastrous that even “Daily Show” host Jon Stewart was plainly mystified and unconvinced when Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius came on his show the other day to offer reassurances. Judging by the haphazard beginning -- error messages have been the norm, and the federal website has had to be taken offline several times -- you’d guess that this was a back-burner project for the Obama administration, or the start date for the exchanges had been sprung on it a few weeks ago. Of course, it is the president’s most cherished initiative, and his team has had more than three years to get the exchanges up and running. Imagine the chaos if this were something the administration cared about less. The conservative trope used
to be that Americans shouldn’t want health care delivered by the people who Rich run the post Lowry office. The new conserNational vative trope Review could be that Americans shouldn’t want health care delivered by the people who built HealthCare.gov. A young man named Chad Henderson achieved instant media celebrity by claiming to have signed up for Obamacare on the federal exchange. So desperate were reporters to find someone who had managed this unlikely feat that they flocked to him for interviews about his amazing experience -- except even he hadn’t actually done it. How many people sign up for insurance on the exchanges, and what kind of people (young or old, sick or healthy), is central to the future of the law. But administration officials won’t say how many people have enrolled. This is either because they do know and are too embarrassed to say, or because the system is so dysfunctional, it is genuine-
ly impossible to determine. The website problems are the result, according to the administration, of overwhelming volume. Experts disagree. CBS quoted a sympathetic programmer named Luke Chung observing that “it wasn’t designed well, it wasn’t implemented well, and it looks like nobody tested it.” The Washington Post cited two allies of the administration who “said they approached White House officials this year to raise concerns that the federal exchange was not ready to launch. In both cases, Obama officials assured them there was no cause for alarm.” President Barack Obama and his team have repeatedly compared Obamacare’s “glitches” to those of the new Apple operating system. But Steve Jobs was a famously demanding and exacting boss. If he had run Apple like HHS, it would have been the best thing ever to happen to BlackBerry. The more apt comparison might be to the FBI, which had an epic years-long struggle to upgrade its computer system, beset by software meltdowns and cost overruns. Presumably, the adminis-
tration will eventually make its website work, since it doesn’t involve radically new technology. The more fundamental question is whether the larger project is sustainable when the exchanges need young and healthy people to sign up, at the same time they will have to pay sharply more under Obamacare. The San Jose (Calif.) Mercury News quoted one Cindy Vinson, an Obamacare supporter, who was disconcerted to learn that she will have to pay $1,800 more a year for an individual policy. “Of course, I want people to have health care,” she said. “I just didn’t realize I would be the one who was going to pay for it personally.” She might not have realized it because the president of the United States never mentions it. In all his speeches about Obamacare, he never quite gets around to the part about some premiums going up, which for people forced to pay more will probably be the most salient feature of the law. But hey, what possibly could go wrong? (Rich Lowry can be reached via e-mail: comments.lowry@nationalreview.com)
Revisiting ‘American Graffiti’ with the kids On Saturday nights at my house, I often trot out classic movies and force the urchins to watch them. There is much wailing and gnashing of teeth, but I think it’s important to teach kids about American culture, and films certainly are a big part of it. Actors like John Wayne, Cary Grant, Marilyn Monroe and Audrey Hepburn are worth seeing and remembering. So the other night I trotted out “American Graffiti,” a film released 40 years ago. The movie was directed by “Star Wars” creator George Lucas and chronicles one night in the lives of some California teenagers in the year 1962. The first thing the kids noticed was Harrison Ford playing a young hood driving a hot rod. That got their attention. The movie features other great actors such as Richard Dreyfuss and Charles Martin Smith,
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along with Ron Howard and Cindy Williams, who turned the “Graffiti” sucBill cess into the O’Reilly t e l e v i s i o n hits “Happy The O’Reilly Days” and Factor “Laverne and Shirley.” About 20 minutes into the movie, which is heavy on dialogue and light on explosions, the urchins pulled out their iPads and began typing away. Dismay enveloped me. “So you don’t like this?” I asked the 14-year-old. “It’s OK. I’m listening.” “But you’re playing with that machine!” “I can multitask!” A few minutes later, the 10-year-old demanded popcorn. I told him we’d get some halfway through the flick.
“Do they ever get out of the cars?” the urchin wailed. “That’s the culture in California. They cruise around in cars listening to the radio.” “But there are so many cars!” I was losing them. So I paused the movie and brought in snacks. I demanded they shut off the machines while eating. “Why?” the 14-year-old asked. “Because you can’t text, eat and watch a movie at the same time.” “Yes, I can. I always do that.” “They’re still in cars,” the 8-year-old said. We got through the movie, but just barely. Their interest peaked when The Pharaohs, a gang of juvenile delinquents, forced Dreyfuss to vandalize a police car. Finally, some destruction! After “American Graffiti”
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concluded, I asked for their reviews. I got them while their heads were down looking at their iPads. The consensus: It was OK. Too many cars. These days, the machines and awful films that blow things up every 10 econds are delivering heavy blows to American culture. The graffiti is on the wall. The attention spans of young people average about 30 seconds. Baseball? Forget it. Chess? Are you kidding me? We live in a time where machines that deliver instant gratification rule. But I will continue to fight the cyberspace power. Coming attraction: Hitchcock’s “The Birds.” Let the texting begin. Veteran TV news anchor Bill O’Reilly is host of the Fox News show “The O’Reilly Factor” and author of many books, including the newly released “Killing Jesus.”
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