In the 1994 movie “Dumb and Dumber” one of the characters drives through the countryside in a van and says “according to the map, we’ve only gone four inches.”
That’s dumb.
But here’s what someone who’s supposed to be smart said recently about Americans. Jonathan Gruber, an economist who teaches at MIT and is the architect behind Obamacare, believes American voters are like the dumb guy in the van, unable to tell where we’re going as a nation. In a 2013 interview he gave at the University of Pennsylvania, he explained that Obamacare was written in opaque language because the voters were dumb enough to swallow it whole:
… this bill [the Affordable Care Act] was written in a tortured way to make sure CBO [the Congressional Budget Office] did not score the mandate as taxes. If CBO scored the mandate as taxes, the bill dies. Okay, so it’s written to do that. In terms of risk-rated subsidies, if you had a law which said that healthy people are going to pay in — you made explicit healthy people pay in and sick people get money, it would not have passed. … Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical for the thing to pass. … Look, I wish … that we could make it all transparent, but I’d rather have this law than not.
In other words, Gruber — who’s super smart — says Obamacare’s rollout was purposefully complicated so that people wouldn’t figure out the details until millions are forced from their insurance plans. Liberals have always had disdain for average, hard working Americans. Ian Tuttle documented some of the liberals’ contempt:
To a supporter who told Adlai Stevenson he would have “the vote of every thinking person,” Stevenson famously replied, “That’s not enough, madam. We need a majority.” Said Senator John Kerry in 2006, if “you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq.” And in 2009, Gore Vidal, whose estimation of his own intelligence had no limits, proclaimed Barack Obama “too intelligent” for America.
But sometimes even the self-appointed smart people get caught being dumb.
Here’s the truth: Americans never fell for Obamacare.
Even with celebrity endorsements – like Kobe Bryant using his torn Achilles to tout the need for the plan – Obama has never gotten even 50 percent support for the law. They had to use procedural gimmicks to get it passed over Americans’ objections.
Maybe it’s time for Gruber – and his fellow Democrats in DC – to re-evaluate their definition of stupid. The only stupid actors in this drama are Congressional Democrats who didn’t read the bill, didn’t understand that the president was scamming them, and who have now been thrashed by the American voters.
In other words, Democrats didn’t pull the wool over our eyes. The people didn’t vote for this, never have, and never would. And when they had a chance to speak out against it, they did. The Washington Examiner reports:
15 Senators who voted for Obamacare either failed to win reelection or declined to run for reelection and had their seats turned over to Republicans. That number is likely to grow once the results are in from the Senate runoff in Louisiana, which Mary Landrieu is expected to lose.
Maybe I should clarify. Republicans didn’t trust, believe or support the Democrats in any way – not even with Kobe’s endorsement. The only people who supported Obamacare were the Democrats’ own constituents. The MIT professor must’ve smugly been giving the “dumb” label to the few number of people – hardcore Democrats — who supported Obamacare. And he’s even wrong about them. Obama’s constituents had blind faith in their representatives, because they trusted them, expected them to be truthful, and believed the president when he said, “If you like your healthcare plan, you can keep your healthcare plan.”
Now that everyone knows the Democrats have breached the trust of their own constituents, they’ll never be trusted again.
The Democrats voters weren’t dumb, they just trusted people who were lying to them.
Mark Meckler is the President of Citizens for Self-Governance and co-founder of the Convention of States Project.