December 9, 2013--The Rollout

I've been having a back and forth with a friend about the rollout of Obamacare.

She is being extra-critical, feeling that the botched launch of the Website is emblematic of Obama's botched presidency. "He's great at articulating big ideas but when it comes to actually getting the work done, he either has no interest, is inept, or a combination of both."

I haven't been disagreeing with her--I too am quite disappointed with the president about whom I initially had great hopes. But I've been saying that Obamacare is not about the website but about Obamacare itself.

If in a year or two 30 to 40 million people who do not now have health insurance are by then covered and are satisfied, healthier, and the cost of care overall continues to decline, who will even remember the website fiasco?

"But, I fear," she says, "that conservatives will continue to claim that the federal government is incapable of carrying out big projects. They will say it's only private industry that is capable of doing large-scale things."

"If they say that," I've been asserting, "they will be ignoring much of the history of the last 150 years when the federal government took the lead in the construction of the transcontinental railroad, electrified all of America (especially remote, rural America), built the interstate highway system, constructed huge dams, mobilized to win the Second World War, and launched Social Security and Medicare. All of these massive undertakings were criticized in their day by some of the same kind of small-government  conservatives we're seeing today--saying they were unconstitutional, socialistic, would never work, and were going to bankrupt us to boot. Sound familiar?"

"Yes," my friend has been acknowledging, "Though all of this got done, that was then and what we are seeing is now. I feel we have lost our way since the Manhattan Project and the TVA. Maybe even more recently after successes with Medicare and Medicaid. There may very well be truth to the claim that now it is only private enterprise that can get the job done."

"You mean like the folks who brought us the Edsel, New Coke, and the collapse of the Big Three auto companies? These failures were all the result of private industry hubris."

At best, in spite of my efforts to marshall history to provide some context for what we see today, my friend remains skeptical, even pessimistic. "We're things at these earlier times as bitterly partisan, with both side only interested in winning?"

"That to. The things they said about Lincoln, Wilson, Teddy Roosevelt and FDR were pretty ugly. The attacks weren't magnified as much as they are today since they didn't have 24/7 so-called news networks, but still things back then could be vicious. And yet they found ways to accomplish some big things."

"You could be right. Some times having a historical perspective helps."

"We could talk about Jefferson and Jackson and . . ."

"For the moment," my friend at last laughed, "let's stick with the Roosevelts. There's only so much history I can deal with in the morning."