George F. Will, himself no stranger to adolescent arguments--or, for that matter, aiding and abetting felonies, such as his silence on the matters of how Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush each managed to steal their presidencies--recently launched this tirade against Barack Obama, who has labored for the last five years to undo at least some of the damage done by his infamous predecessors. In term-paper fashion--itself something of an adolescent strategy--Will attempts to identify four illustrations of the President's alleged arrested development in the latter's well-earned victory lap around the launch of Obamacare.
He faults Obama for a supposed "straw man": the argument that no one would sign up. Any cursory review of the anti-ACA rhetoric over the past several months would find that scarecrow to have very real legs. He faults him for saying the debate over the ACA is over. Perhaps Will, given his forte for helping to rig elections, doesn't regard any outcome he dislikes as The End. But one would think that Obama's re-election, combined with nearly 50 unsuccessful repeal attempts and a rapidly shifting public mood on the subject, should end the debate over Obamacare's right to exist.
Will further faults Obama for saying that the ACA is "working," declaring health care reform to be "a substantial net subtraction from the nation’s well-being," but offering no evidence of the "subtraction" or its "substantial" nature. Tell that to the more than 10 million Americans who signed up for it--or the other ones who benefit from the law's provisions requiring coverage of pre-existing conditions. The real subtraction that's happening now in health care is taking place in red states, where governors are refusing to accept the bill's Medicaid expansion provisions, despite the fact that doing so would save the states millions of dollars by offering an alternative to reimbursing emergency-room fees.
This last point undermines Will's final attack on Obama as someone who allegedly thinks all attacks on him are personal. Red-state governors are, in fact, undermining their own oaths of office by allowing thousands of their own citizens to suffer and even die because, well, they just can't afford to admit Obama might have had a good idea or two. Will wants to pretend that, for him and his fellow-travellers in the VRWC, opposing the President is some sort of noble intellectual exercise. Sadly, the actual, real-world death of Charlene Dill proves something else.
If Will is really looking for an adolescent argument, why not look to the conservative proclamation that the end of the Cold War represented "the end of history"? All of the essential ingredients--straw person arguments ("some would argue for appeasement"), the shutting down of debate, the demonization of the opposition, the relentless assertion of superiority--are right there, and have been used to support a political tide of conservatism in this country that is supported everywhere but among the public. The end of the Cold War was far from the end of history and, as it turns out, it wasn't even the end of Marxism--or, at least, of Marxist ideas. Thomas Piketty, and his book “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” are proving that to be true. As Paul Krugman has noted, the book's popularity has launched a full-scale panic among conservatives, a panic that, in the case of David Brooks, has already launched a changed view on inheritance taxes.
Don't lecture the President on the subject of arrested development, Mr. Will, until you've come to terms with your own stuck-in-the-'80s psyche. The adolescence you end may be your own.
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