Yes, okay, that's a tease. The tea-baggers are load and oafish and dangerous and disruptive and badly misinformed. But they are right where it counts: they fear that whatever happens (a) their own health care will be worse; and (b) it will cost more.
The point is that these are not irrational fears. Not irrational for two reasons. One, because insuring all the (indigent) uninsured is going to cost somebody money, and the administration has already made noises (with vast improvidence) about how they might tap other programs to get it. And two. there isn't enough contrary information out there to put it to rest.
Translated: the real point is that nobody knows what ObamaCare is--including, I suspect,Obama. Apparently this the fruit of a conscious choice on the part of the administration. There is no end of Monday-morning about that decision just now (of which I, I suppose, am ap part). But remember the first rule of paranoia: no information is also scarier than any information.* If you have no information, you can imagine anything. And that is exactly what the tea-baggers are doing now.
Without laboring the record, I think the best you can surmise is that what we have here on Obama's part is a horrendous rookie mistake--perhaps not surprising from a rookie, a bit moreso considering how hard he has worked to surround himself with experienced talent (Emanuel, Daschle, etc.). The people who said he was an empty suitare looking pretty good.
The good news is that there is some evidence that he is a good rebounder who knows how to learn his mistakes. And blowing the first year of your presidency is not necessarily a disaster. With any kind luck, he may have found his footing by the end of August. Oh wait...
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*Scholarly window dressing: Ed Lemert, Paranoia and the Dynamics of Exclusion.
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