Mickey Kaus: Obama Didn't Have to Lose the Seniors

 

Orszag's Chickens Come Home to Roost!

Fully 23 percent of the voters in the midterms were age 65 or over, according to the exit polls—a figure Newsweek's Andrew Romano calls "historic." These older voters sided against Obama's Democrats by a 59-38 margin, "by far the largest pro-GOP margin of any age group." Not coincidentally, 58 percent of the senior voters also said they want Obama's health care law to be repealed.

Who's to blame? I nominate Peter Orszag, Obama's former Office of Management and Budget director and the man who convinced the president to make "bending the cost curve" a central selling point of health care reform. I also blame Orszag's Obamaite acolytes, and of course Obama himself, who gave the distinct impression that "bending the curve" required some kind of denial of treatment, including (perhaps especially) treatments for "those toward the end of their lives"—treatments Obama called "a huge driver of cost."

Is it surprising that Americans who are getting on toward the end of their lives—and who don't need Obama's health insurance "exchanges" because they're already covered by Medicare—failed to support Obama's plan? Obama himself gave, as an example of socially wasteful spending, the hip replacement his grandmother got after she was told she had terminal cancer. Perhaps seniors thought hard about Obama's example and said, "Hmm. Our idea of health care reform isn't having some 'independent' board decide we aren't worth a hip replacement."

Was it really necessary for Obama to alienate seniors—making it seem as if health insurance for the poor was going to be financed out of their hides, or at least their hips?

Mickey Kaus, Newsweek, November 5, 2010.

If you want to know why the John Doe calling himself “Barack Obama” obsessively stuck to his teleprompter while campaigning in 2008 and early in his occupation of the Oval Office, it was so that he wouldn’t reveal himself.

This year we have seen multiple black eruptions, in which he has expressed the racism that goes with being an adherent of genocidal, Black Liberation Theology. And robbing old white folks of medical care--and not just for unnecessary hip replacements, but basic care--on behalf of illegal alien invaders like his Auntie Zeituni is a policy objective very close to “Obama’s” heart.