Health Care
Imagine that you are president. Your party has passed a major overhaul of health care. However, on the eve of midterm elections you learn that about a million people, many (perhaps most) of whom normally support your party, will lose their health care coverage as a direct result of provisions of that law. Do you:
1) Admit that the law, which few if any legislators read beforehand, was a mistake, and work to repeal it.
2) Offer exemptions to the law to the companies that employ these people, effectively putting the problem off until after Election Day.
Click here for the answer.
Well If I am president I leave it up to Kathleen Sebelius and she leaves it up to underlings to consider exceptions on a case by case basis. One problem is that the political expectations and arguments against the health care bill sort act to give leverage to companies like McDonalds. Every logically possible political argument is a policy consideration, and since a majority of these conflict, everything is a ballancing act. The main reason congress doesn't know what is in a bill is that the CFR's haven't yet been written on them, and the various executive agencies of the federal government, and the judicial branch have yet to sort out all the rullings distinguishing exceptions that can be granted from "spot zonning"(that is exceptions that only bennefit a narrow class of private companies at the expense of the general public.).
I say look, we are engaged in a giant game of picking winners and losers, even if we repealed the bill we would be picking winners and losers. That is what policy is about, that is what the GS bureacrats and Social Scientists do, that is why there is an army of lawyers trying to figure out exactly what the law is and how it will impact their corporate clients. Its a clusterfuck... But look Obama has done just about everything he promised he would do, and republicans would love for us not to carve out these exceptions so that they could point out that the results of Obama Care are as bad as promised.
Actually I have Bidden say something like this naturally, as a semi-gaffe. As president I would stick to broad themes, and make use of metaphors such as getting the car out of the ditch only to have republicans ask for the keys back.
I would just addapt the metaphor and say that the health care bill helped get the car out of the ditch and back on the road, but an approaching car swerved to dodge the car that was back on the road, and it went in the ditch so we crafted some exceptions to pull it out of the ditch and republicans complained about that as well.
Republican arguments go something like the unintended consequences of pulling back into the road from the ditch is to force cars on the road into the ditch, therefore no one should ever get out of the ditch.