McArdle's Temper Tantrum

Conservative pundit Megan McArdle went off on the passage of health care reform in The Atlantic.

What I hope is that the Democrats take a beating at the ballot box and rethink their contempt for those mouth-breathing illiterates in the electorate. I hope Obama gets his wish to be a one-term president who passed health care.

Not because I think I will like his opponent--I very much doubt that I will support much of anything Obama's opponent says. But because politicians shouldn't feel that the best route to electoral success is to lie to the voters, and then ignore them.

Wow.

McArdle's complaint is based in the right-wing talking point that Obama and the Democrats are ignoring "the will of the people" in passing health care reform while opinion polls show majorities oppose it. This point is as misleading as the claim that HCR is a "government takeover of 1/6th of the economy." When you unpack those poll numbers you find two things. First, majorities favor most of the individual pieces of the bill (e.g. ending exclusions by recission or by pre-existing condition, allowing purchase of policies across state lines, cutting waste and fraud). Second, a percentage of those "opposing" the bill do so because it is "not liberal enough" rather than "too liberal" as the Republicans argue.

A more important problem with this GOP argument is expressed well by George Packer in his New Yorker blog Interesting Times.

In the House debate, Republican after Republican excoriated the Democrats for defying the will of the American people—as if the elections of 2006 and 2008 were inconsequential compared to a couple of last fall’s Rasmussen polls on health care.

Exactly. Barack Obama won 53% of the popular vote in the '08 election with health care reform as a key component of his campaign. So did most of the Democrats in both houses of Congress who passed this bill. Given that, exactly how did Obama and the Democrats "lie to the voters and then ignore them?"

Megan, elections have consequences. Your side lost. Suck it up and deal with it.

UPDATE: Andrew Sullivan's readers chime in.

Sometimes the other side just wins - it doesn't mean the end of the country as we know it, and it doesn't mean that they cheated.

--Ballard Burgher