On Monday’s “On the Record,” former Republican presidential adviser Pat Buchanan said Obamacare is doing fundamental damage to President Obama, the Democratic Party and liberalism in general. the failures of Obamacare have done to the Barack Obama presidency, the Democratic Party and liberalism in general.
Guest host Dana Perino asked the author of “Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?” about the disastrous health care law’s political damage.
“[T]his is getting very redundant, Dana,” Buchanan explained. “But you know, more important than that, in the one thing breaking down after another, I agree with Sarah Palin, the endemic problem is with the whole program itself, what has happened, people losing their health care and all the rest. And this is going beyond crippling Barack Obama’s presidency, destroying his credibility. It is destroying I think or damaging severely the fundamental progressive idea, the philosophy of the Democratic Party that government can really do great and good things and can do them well, given enough time and effort. I’ve never seen such damage to the liberal idea, I think, since 1968 when Lyndon Johnson’s presidency was broken.”
Buchanan listed the problems with the Obamacare law but added that he thought some of these pitfalls were intentional.
“OK, 5 million people have lost their health care and can’t get it and millions of others who have employer plans are about to lose their health care. What do you care about whether some website is 80 percent working or not? The whole thing is not being able to go to certain hospitals, they’re losing doctors, their premiums are increasing, their benefits are decreasing, they’re losing some plans, forced to get others. This whole thing is a debacle. And quite frankly, I do think this is whole thing was planned this way, as a redistribution of wealth and redistribution of funds, money and resources from one group of Americans to another.”
Buchanan said that Obama was supposed to be to liberalism what former President Ronald Reagan was to conservatism, but it’s not working out that way, mainly because of this law, which has further tarnished the image of government in the eyes of the public.
“Well you know Dana, by now it’s been two months, and as Churchill once said, the rubble is beginning to bounce,” Buchanan continued. “One after another after another of these stories are adding to the public’s dissatisfaction with what Obamacare is producing — their distrust of government. And I don’t think this is going to stop. because even if you have the Obamacare website up there at 100 percent, you mean the other people losing their health care and hospitals and doctors, all the rest, that is going through to the new year.
“You know, Barack Obama promised he was going to be a transformational president,” Buchanan said. “He was going to be for progressives what Ronald Reagan was for conservatives. And we now see his basic program, his legacy program — his great achievement is becoming increasingly a great disaster and a great failure. So I think it is not only again the president that’s got a problem, it is the philosophy of Democratic Party, and I don’t know whenever again a president will attempt this great leap forward with government.”
Perino asked if there were any outs for Obama and what Buchanan would advise Obama to do if he were still a presidential adviser. According to Buchanan, there’s not much he can do.
“I don’t know what they can do, Dana, because I think it’s baked in the cake,” Buchanan said. “I do know this, there should have been aides close to the president who every time they heard some report that something was going wrong with his top program and he didn’t know it, they would say, ‘Mr. President, this rollout could be a real problem. And we’re hearing this from HHS. And people came over from that computer firm and they told us this. Maybe we ought to hold this thing up for a year, maybe even if we have to give in to the Republicans and we get some egg on our face, put it off for a year because we bet the farm on this, this is our number one program, it’s your legacy, we believe in it, it’s our philosophy. You don’t plunge ahead with something, it’s like invading a place when you get a report that the enemy is all over the beaches and you didn’t know it.”