The Belmont Club:
History is surprising because it’s full of callbacks. In the programming world there are many times when the result of an instruction cannot be immediately known because it takes time to finish. Perhaps you must wait long query to finish or await the response of a distant user. At all events you must wait. While that is going the code moves on, doing other things. But when the result eventually returns it calls the main program back (hence the term callback) signalling “I’m here. What do I do with this data?” Then the main program has to figure out what to do with it.
Human events are similarly asynchronous. When the administration created a power vacuum in the Middle East or created the massive Obamacare health insurance system the supporters and critics were divided over whether they were good or bad policies. But then that was all a matter of opinion. The actual outcome had to await events; and in the meantime the debate petered out of the news cycle which moved on.
But eventually the remote call returns and now the main narrative has to figure out what to do with it. The administration’s foreign policy called back some time ago and sounding like it came from the ’80s. Now the rap on the door signals the callback of Obamacare and it is a disaster. Sarah Kliff, one of the Affordable Care Act’s most vocal supporters, consoles herself by declaring she always knew it would be expensive. “One fact that’s easy to loose sight of now: Obamacare premiums are actually right around where CBO thought they would be now.” It’s not like she’s surprised.
In separate article in Vox, Kliff makes a valiant attempt at arguing that Obamacare’s premiums are not rising — they’re just catching up. “When Obamacare launched, premiums were much lower than analysts had expected. Insurance plans are now bringing their premiums more in line with expectations, and after they do that, they won’t have to make these big rate increases again.” But even she knows what the forlorn callback signifies: “These numbers are bad news for Obamacare — we just don’t know how bad, exactly, the news is at this point.”
The delayed effects of past actions show up all the time and dealing with them is the most difficult of all problems for the Narrative. It can suppress things temporarily but it cannot suppress things forever, which is a problem even for the most formidable of Talking Points systems. You would think that now Obamacare’s advocates would accept they made a mistake. You would think.
But that’s not necessarily the case. When Damon Linker at the Week asks “why won’t anyone admit that America is fighting 5 wars?” or Missy Ryan in the Washington Post writes ‘when will we wake up to the fact that the Obama administration is bombing in six countries?’ you might imagine the answer is when refugees show up at the border or attacks happen on Main Street.
But there is another way of dealing with consequences that politicians use all the time, which is to send the result back to the future. They chain the promise to another promise. They take it out of the present and pack it into the blue once more. The refugee crisis is answered by opening Europe’s borders which will surely work in the coming years. IN the realm of healthcare the plan is apparently to sweep the wreckage of Obamacare into a still-unnamed Single Payer program so we’ll be back where started: with supporters and critics were divided over whether it will work, but awaiting results. It will all be a matter of opinion until the Single Payer callback shows up.
Yeah back when the eco-wackos were telling us the world would be all flooded by now I can still remember all this poppycock about cities under domes and wearing gas masks and a dead earth POPPYCOCK ALL
Healthcare is still as inherently expensive as it ever was. All Obamacare did was wreck a fairly efficient and effective method of providing it. Now it is more expensive than ever imagined and getting more so.
Liberals moaned and complained about the creation of a “power vacuum” in the Middle East by taking out Hussein. That administration wisely filled the vacuum while a government was being formed. THIS administration destroyed the protective measures and created a disastrous vacuum, not just in Iraq, but in Libya as well.
The liberal solution? The solution recommended by the very people that screwed this up so completely? “Let US fix it.”
Thanks, but no thanks.
@Bill:
That nasty woman, mrs clinton, says she does not want to eliminate the unaffordable no care act, she wants to take what works, /sarc, and improve upon it. That nasty woman, mrs clinton, is lying because the unaffordable no care act is designed not to work, at least for
The American people.
It is designed to work for the central planners and the masterminds in Washington DC.